15,057 research outputs found
Scaling behavior in economics: II. Modeling of company growth
In the preceding paper we presented empirical results describing the growth
of publicly-traded United States manufacturing firms within the years
1974--1993. Our results suggest that the data can be described by a scaling
approach. Here, we propose models that may lead to some insight into these
phenomena. First, we study a model in which the growth rate of a company is
affected by a tendency to retain an ``optimal'' size. That model leads to an
exponential distribution of the logarithm of the growth rate in agreement with
the empirical results. Then, we study a hierarchical tree-like model of a
company that enables us to relate the two parameters of the model to the
exponent , which describes the dependence of the standard deviation of
the distribution of growth rates on size. We find that , where defines the mean branching ratio of the hierarchical tree and
is the probability that the lower levels follow the policy of higher
levels in the hierarchy. We also study the distribution of growth rates of this
hierarchical model. We find that the distribution is consistent with the
exponential form found empirically.Comment: 19 pages LateX, RevTeX 3, 6 figures, to appear J. Phys. I France
(April 1997
Scaling behavior in economics: I. Empirical results for company growth
We address the question of the growth of firm size. To this end, we analyze
the Compustat data base comprising all publicly-traded United States
manufacturing firms within the years 1974-1993. We find that the distribution
of firm sizes remains stable for the 20 years we study, i.e., the mean value
and standard deviation remain approximately constant. We study the distribution
of sizes of the ``new'' companies in each year and find it to be well
approximated by a log-normal. We find (i) the distribution of the logarithm of
the growth rates, for a fixed growth period of one year, and for companies with
approximately the same size displays an exponential form, and (ii) the
fluctuations in the growth rates -- measured by the width of this distribution
-- scale as a power law with , . We find
that the exponent takes the same value, within the error bars, for
several measures of the size of a company. In particular, we obtain:
for sales, for number of employees,
for assets, for cost of goods sold, and
for property, plant, & equipment.Comment: 16 pages LateX, RevTeX 3, 10 figures, to appear J. Phys. I France
(April 1997
Multifractal Properties of the Random Resistor Network
We study the multifractal spectrum of the current in the two-dimensional
random resistor network at the percolation threshold. We consider two ways of
applying the voltage difference: (i) two parallel bars, and (ii) two points.
Our numerical results suggest that in the infinite system limit, the
probability distribution behaves for small current i as P(i) ~ 1/i. As a
consequence, the moments of i of order q less than q_c=0 do not exist and all
current of value below the most probable one have the fractal dimension of the
backbone. The backbone can thus be described in terms of only (i) blobs of
fractal dimension d_B and (ii) high current carrying bonds of fractal dimension
going from to d_B.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures; 1 reference added; to appear in Phys. Rev. E
(Rapid Comm
Scaling for the Percolation Backbone
We study the backbone connecting two given sites of a two-dimensional lattice
separated by an arbitrary distance in a system of size . We find a
scaling form for the average backbone mass: , where
can be well approximated by a power law for : with . This result implies that for the entire range . We also propose a scaling
form for the probability distribution of backbone mass for a given
. For is peaked around , whereas for decreases as a power law, , with . The exponents and satisfy the relation
, and is the codimension of the backbone,
.Comment: 3 pages, 5 postscript figures, Latex/Revtex/multicols/eps
Dynamics of Surface Roughening with Quenched Disorder
We study the dynamical exponent for the directed percolation depinning
(DPD) class of models for surface roughening in the presence of quenched
disorder. We argue that for dimensions is equal to the exponent
characterizing the shortest path between two sites in an
isotropic percolation cluster in dimensions. To test the argument, we
perform simulations and calculate for DPD, and for
percolation, from to .Comment: RevTex manuscript 3 pages + 6 figures (obtained upon request via
email [email protected]
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