Abstract
Econophysics, a term neologized only in 1995, refers to physicists studying economics problems using conceptual approaches from physics. Certain ideas are emphasized, especially the ubiquity of scaling laws in distributions of financial returns, income and wealth, firm sizes, city sizes, and other economic phenomena. However, economists have been using many of these techniques since much earlier, and the influence of ideas from physics on economics dates as far back as 1801 at least. Arguably, if economics successfully absorbs the most useful of this work, ‘econophysics’ may cease to exist.
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Barkley Rosser, J. (2018). Econophysics. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2701
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2701
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