Is Econophysics a Solid Science?

TL;DR

Econophysics applies statistical physics methods to economic problems, demonstrating its growing role in analyzing large-scale regularities and fat-tailed distributions in macroeconomics and finance.

Contribution

This paper discusses how econophysics approaches economic issues, highlighting its application to large-scale regularities and fat-tailed distributions, illustrating its scientific validity.

Findings

Econophysics successfully applies physical theories to economic data.

Large-scale regularities and fat tails are key features in macro-economy and finance.

Econophysics offers new insights into economic phenomena.

Abstract

Econophysics is an approach to quantitative economy using ideas, models, conceptual and computational methods of statistical physics. In recent years many of physical theories like theory of turbulence, scaling, random matrix theory or renormalization group were successfully applied to economy giving a boost to modern computational techniques of data analysis, risk management, artificial markets, macro-economy, {\it etc.} Econophysics became a regular discipline covering a large spectrum of problems of modern economy. It is impossible to review the whole field in a short paper. Here we shall instead attempt to give a flavor of how econophysics approaches economical problems by discussing one particular issue as an example: the emergence and consequences of large scale regularities, which in particular occur in the presence of fat tails in probability distributions in macro-economy and quantitative finance.