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AKE: Arbeitskreis Energie

AKE 15: Symposium on Rare Events: Optimal Solutions and Challenges - from Charge Transfer Reactions to Supervolcanoes

AKE 15.1: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 16:30–17:00, Audimax

Rare and large events: examples from the natural sciences and economics — •Thomas Guhr — Universitaet Duisburg-Essen

After an introduction to rare, large and extreme events, I discuss an economics issue which continues to catch our attention: the risk involved with credit contracts and the obvious severe consequences for the stability of the financial system. It is known that the distribution of credit losses has a dangerously heavy tail due to rare, but drastic events. I will show that the tail cannot be reduced in typical economic situations - contrary to some claims made by the financial industry.

Then I turn to an at first sight completely unrelated topic: distributions of wave intensities in disordered systems. In particular, there are recent microwave experiments which yielded quantitative results. I show that both issues, credit risk and intensity distributions, can be studied from a unifying viewpoint by relating them to the underlying non-stationarities.

Finally, I sketch some interesting new results on the statistics of records.