Growth of companies and water-level fluctuations of the river Danube

Recent studies on growth rate of publicly traded companies revealed interesting scaling properties and universality. Based on the statistical analysis, different models have been proposed to cast light into the inner workings of companies responsible for the phenomena observed. The purpose of this paper is to point out that the properties of the analysed economic data might be present in a wider class of complex systems producing strongly correlated noisy time series. As an illustration, we report an investigation of the daily water-level fluctuations of the river Danube over a period of 87 years, as measured in Nagymaros, Hungary. The Danube data shows similar characteristics to those seen in the company growth. This suggests that a universal description of the statistics should exist for both systems.