Universal Laws in Economics: Doing Economics with Statistical Physics Methods
Xavier Gabaix
Thu Jan 24, 04-06:00pm, E51-372
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Economic data display a series of robust relationships that seem to hold across different times and economic systems. They are sometimes called "universal relationships". For instance, the distribution of firms, cities, mutual funds and even internet sites seem to follow "Zipf's law." Zipf's law says that the size of firms (resp. city, mutual fund etc) of the n-th largest city is proportional to 1/n. Similarly robust patterns have been found in he scaling of stock market fluctuations, trading activity, firm and GDP growth dynamics. This talk will survey the evidence and proposed explanations for those regularities. They typically have a "statistical physics" flavor.
Contact: Melissa Maney, E52-380, 252-1565, mbegley@mit.edu
Sponsor: Economics
Latest update: 10-Jan-2002
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