IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v293y2001i3p573-582.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Power law distribution of the duration and magnitude of recessions in capitalist economies: breakdown of scaling

Author

Listed:
  • Ormerod, Paul
  • Mounfield, Craig

Abstract

Power law distributions of macroscopic observables are ubiquitous in both the natural and social sciences. They are indicative of correlated, cooperative phenomena between groups of interacting agents at the microscopic level. In this paper, we argue that when one is considering aggregate macroeconomic data (annual growth rates in real per capita GDP in the seventeen leading capitalist economies from 1870 through to 1994) the magnitude and duration of recessions over the business cycle do indeed follow power law like behaviour for a significant proportion of the data (demonstrating the existence of cooperative phenomena amongst economic agents). Crucially, however, there are systematic deviations from this behaviour when one considers the frequency of occurrence of large recessions. Under these circumstances the power law scaling breaks down. It is argued that it is the adaptive behaviour of the agents (their ability to recognise the changing economic environment) which modifies their cooperative behaviour.

Suggested Citation

  • Ormerod, Paul & Mounfield, Craig, 2001. "Power law distribution of the duration and magnitude of recessions in capitalist economies: breakdown of scaling," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 293(3), pages 573-582.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:293:y:2001:i:3:p:573-582
    DOI: 10.1016/S0378-4371(01)00108-X
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843710100108X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/S0378-4371(01)00108-X?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hideaki Aoyama & Yuichi Nagahara & Mitsuhiro P. Okazaki & Wataru Souma & Hideki Takayasu & Misako Takayasu, 2000. "Pareto's Law for Income of Individuals and Debt of Bankrupt Companies," Papers cond-mat/0006038, arXiv.org.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wright, Ian, 2005. "The social architecture of capitalism," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 346(3), pages 589-620.
    2. Noell, Christian, 2006. "Self-Organization in Agricultural Sectors and the Relevance of Complex Systems Approaches for Applied Economics," 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia 25516, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    3. Ausloos, Marcel & Miśkiewicz, Janusz & Sanglier, Michèle, 2004. "The durations of recession and prosperity: does their distribution follow a power or an exponential law?," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 339(3), pages 548-558.
    4. Campolieti, Michele, 2019. "The durations of recession and prosperity: What distribution do they follow?," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 534(C).
    5. Wright, Ian, 2005. "The duration of recessions follows an exponential not a power law," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 345(3), pages 608-610.
    6. Mauro Gallegati & Gianfranco Giulioni & Nozomi Kichiji, 2003. "Complex Dynamics And Financial Fragility In An Agent-Based Model," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 6(03), pages 267-282.
    7. Marcel Ausloos, 2014. "A biased view of a few possible components when reflecting on the present decade financial and economic crisis," Papers 1412.0127, arXiv.org.
    8. Redelico, Francisco O. & Proto, Araceli N. & Ausloos, Marcel, 2008. "Power law for the duration of recession and prosperity in Latin American countries," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 387(25), pages 6330-6336.
    9. Matutinović, Igor & Salthe, Stanley N. & Ulanowicz, Robert E., 2016. "The mature stage of capitalist development: Models, signs and policy implications," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 17-30.
    10. Di Guilmi, Corrado & Gaffeo, Edoardo & Gallegati, Mauro, 2004. "Empirical results on the size distribution of business cycle phases," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 333(C), pages 325-334.
    11. Salvador Pueyo, 2013. "Is it a power law distribution? The case of economic contractions," Papers 1310.2567, arXiv.org.
    12. Hongduo Cao & Ying Li & Yong Tan, 2014. "The synchronization club: classification of global economic groups by inequality," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(21), pages 2502-2510, July.
    13. Wright, Ian, 2009. "Implicit Microfoundations for Macroeconomics," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 3, pages 1-27.
    14. Guilmi, Corrado Di & Gallegati, Mauro & Ormerod, Paul, 2004. "Scaling invariant distributions of firms’ exit in OECD countries," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 334(1), pages 267-273.
    15. Chu, Zhuang & Yang, Biao & Ha, Chang Yong & Ahn, Kwangwon, 2018. "Modeling GDP fluctuations with agent-based model," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 503(C), pages 572-581.
    16. Salvador Pueyo, 2014. "Ecological Econophysics for Degrowth," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 6(6), pages 1-53, May.
    17. Gaffeo, Edoardo & Gallegati, Mauro & Giulioni, Gianfranco & Palestrini, Antonio, 2003. "Power laws and macroeconomic fluctuations," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 324(1), pages 408-416.
    18. Ormerod, Paul, 2002. "The US business cycle: power law scaling for interacting units with complex internal structure," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 314(1), pages 774-785.
    19. Pierpaolo Andriani & Bill McKelvey, 2009. "Perspective ---From Gaussian to Paretian Thinking: Causes and Implications of Power Laws in Organizations," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 20(6), pages 1053-1071, December.
    20. Chris Noell, 2007. "A look into the nature of complex systems and beyond “Stonehenge” economics: coping with complexity or ignoring it in applied economics?," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 37(2‐3), pages 219-235, September.
    21. Miśkiewicz, J. & Ausloos, M., 2004. "A logistic map approach to economic cycles. (I). The best adapted companies," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 336(1), pages 206-214.
    22. Fabio Clementi & Marco Gallegati & Mauro Gallegati, 2015. "Growth and Cycles of the Italian Economy Since 1861: The New Evidence," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 1(1), pages 25-59, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Solomon Sorin & Golo Natasa, 2013. "Minsky Financial Instability, Interscale Feedback, Percolation and Marshall–Walras Disequilibrium," Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium, De Gruyter, vol. 3(3), pages 167-260, October.
    2. Clementi, F. & Gallegati, M., 2005. "Power law tails in the Italian personal income distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 350(2), pages 427-438.
    3. Ausloos, M. & Bronlet, Ph., 2003. "Strategy for investments from Zipf law(s)," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 324(1), pages 30-37.
    4. Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, 2000. "Power-laws in economics and finance: some ideas from physics," Science & Finance (CFM) working paper archive 500023, Science & Finance, Capital Fund Management.
    5. Xu, Yan & Wang, Yougui & Tao, Xiaobo & Ližbetinová, Lenka, 2017. "Evidence of Chinese income dynamics and its effects on income scaling law," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 487(C), pages 143-152.
    6. Delli Gatti, Domenico & Di Guilmi, Corrado & Gaffeo, Edoardo & Gallegati, Mauro, 2004. "Bankruptcy as an exit mechanism for systems with a variable number of components," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 344(1), pages 8-13.
    7. Boris Podobnik & Davor Horvatic & Alexander M. Petersen & Branko Urov{s}evi'c & H. Eugene Stanley, 2010. "Bankruptcy risk model and empirical tests," Papers 1011.2670, arXiv.org.
    8. Ignacio González García & Alfonso Mateos Caballero, 2021. "Models of Wealth and Inequality Using Fiscal Microdata: Distribution in Spain from 2015 to 2020," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(4), pages 1-24, February.
    9. Jayadev, Arjun, 2008. "A power law tail in India's wealth distribution: Evidence from survey data," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 387(1), pages 270-276.
    10. Guo, Qiang & Gao, Li, 2012. "Distribution of individual incomes in China between 1992 and 2009," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(21), pages 5139-5145.
    11. Kerim Eser Afc{s}ar & Mehmet Ozyi~git & Yusuf Yuksel & Umit Ak{i}nc{i}, 2021. "Testing the Goodwin Growth Cycles with Econophysics Approach in 2002-2019 Period in Turkey," Papers 2106.02546, arXiv.org.
    12. Kaizoji, Taisei, 2003. "Scaling behavior in land markets," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 326(1), pages 256-264.
    13. Aoyama, Hideaki & Souma, Wataru & Fujiwara, Yoshi, 2003. "Growth and fluctuations of personal and company's income," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 324(1), pages 352-358.
    14. Blair Fix, 2018. "Hierarchy and the power-law income distribution tail," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 1(2), pages 471-491, September.
    15. Watanabe, Hayafumi & Takayasu, Hideki & Takayasu, Misako, 2013. "Relations between allometric scalings and fluctuations in complex systems: The case of Japanese firms," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 392(4), pages 741-756.
    16. Atushi Ishikawa & Shouji Fujimoto & Takayuki Mizuno & Tsutomu Watanabe, 2016. "Long-term firm growth properties derived from short-term laws of sales and number of employees in Japan and France," Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Springer, vol. 13(2), pages 409-422, December.
    17. Xin, Xiuying & Jia, Ning & Zheng, Liang & Ma, Shoufeng, 2014. "Power-law in pedestrian crossing flow under the interference of vehicles at an un-signalized midblock crosswalk," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 406(C), pages 287-297.
    18. Mercik, Szymon & Weron, Rafal, 2002. "Origins of scaling in FX markets," MPRA Paper 2294, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Capehart, Kevin W., 2014. "Is the wealth of the world’s billionaires not Paretian?," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 395(C), pages 255-260.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Econophysics;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:293:y:2001:i:3:p:573-582. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.