English

Universal features in the growth dynamics of complex organizations

Statistical Mechanics 2009-10-31 v1 General Finance

Abstract

We analyze the fluctuations in the gross domestic product (GDP) of 152 countries for the period 1950--1992. We find that (i) the distribution of annual growth rates for countries of a given GDP decays with ``fatter'' tails than for a Gaussian, and (ii) the width of the distribution scales as a power law of GDP with a scaling exponent β0.15\beta \approx 0.15. Both findings are in surprising agreement with results on firm growth. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the evolution of organizations with complex structure is governed by similar growth mechanisms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9804100,
  title  = {Universal features in the growth dynamics of complex organizations},
  author = {Youngki Lee and Luis A. N. Amaral and David Canning and Martin Meyer and H. Eugene Stanley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9804100},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 7 ps figures, using Latex2e with epsf rotate and multicol style files. Submitted to PRL