We develop analogies between economic systems and thermodynamics, and show how economic quantities can characterize the state of an economic system in equilibrium. We argue that just as a physical system in thermodynamic equilibrium requires a nonmechanical variable ~the temperature T) to specify its state, so does an economic system. In addition, both systems must have a corresponding conjugat...

In the market economies, sustained output growth is always accompanied by persistent fluctuations. Whether the fluctuations are caused by external shocks or deterministic forces has been a controversial issue in economics, with the dominant mainstream paradigm favouring the former. Here we examine the hypothesis that an important determinant of periods and sizes of expansion and recession is th...

There is renewed interest in understanding how fluctuations in mortality and in health are related to fluctuations in economic conditions. The traditional perspective that economic recessions lower health and raise mortality has been challenged by recent findings that reveal mortality is actually procyclical. The epidemiology of the phenomenon - traffic accidents, cardiovascular disease, and sm...

The dynamic network of relationships among corporations underlies cascading economic failures including the current economic crisis, and can be inferred from correlations in market value fluctuations. We analyze the time dependence of the network of correlations to reveal the changing relationships among the financial, technology, and basic materials sectors with rising and falling markets and ...

We formalize the idea that uncertainty is generated by news about future developments in economic conditions which are not perfectly predictable by the agents. With a simple model of limited information we show that uncertainty shocks can be obtained as the square of news shocks. We develop a two-step econometric procedure to estimate the effects of news and we find highly nonlinear effects. La...

This paper presents new evidence on the persistence of fluctuations in real GNP. Two measures of persistence are estimated non-parametricaFly using post-war quarterly data from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These estimates are compared with Monte Carlo results from various AR(2J processes. For six Out of seven countries, the results indicate t...

Demographic research on preindustrial societies has documented links between harvest yields, grain prices, real wages, and changes in mortality, but mortality hikes as a result of agricultural failures or grain price inflation become more muted as the level of development increases. 1–5 During the early industrialization period in the 19th century, decades of rapid economic growth coincided wit...

There has been much recent discussion ahout the ultimate sources of macroeconomic variability. A number ofauthors attribute most of this variability to only B few sowces, sometimes only one. Although there may be only B few important sources, this is fsr from obvious, since economies seem compliested. The purpose of this paper is to provide qusntitstive estimates of various sowces of vsriabilit...