Econophysics review: I. Empirical facts

This article and the companion paper aim at reviewing recent empirical and theoretical developments usually grouped under the term Econophysics. Since the name was coined in 1995 by merging the words ‘Economics’ and ‘Physics’, this new interdisciplinary field has grown in various directions: theoretical macroeconomics (wealth distribution), microstructure of financial markets (order book modeling), econometrics of financial bubbles and crashes, etc. We discuss the interactions between Physics, Mathematics, Economics and Finance that led to the emergence of Econophysics. We then present empirical studies revealing the statistical properties of financial time series. We begin the presentation with the widely acknowledged ‘stylized facts’, which describe the returns of financial assets—fat tails, volatility clustering, autocorrelation, etc.—and recall that some of these properties are directly linked to the way ‘time’ is taken into account. We continue with the statistical properties observed on order books in financial markets. For the sake of illustrating this review, (nearly) all the stated facts are reproduced using our own high-frequency financial database. Finally, contributions to the study of correlations of assets such as random matrix theory and graph theory are presented. The companion paper will review models in Econophysics from the point of view of agent-based modeling.