We present a new limit theorem for random means: if the sample size is not deterministic but has a negative binomial or geometric distribution, the limit distribution of the normalised random mean is a t-distribution with degrees of freedom depending on the shape parameter of the negative...

This paper is about the city size and growth rate distributions as seen from the perspectives of Zipf's and Gibrat's law. We demonstrate that the Gibrat and Zipf views are theoretically incompatible in view of the Fisher-Tippett theorem, and show that the conflicting hypotheses about the size...

While earning processes are commonly unobservable income flows which evolve in continuous time, observable income data are usually discrete, having been aggregated over time. We consider continuous-time earning processes, specifically (non-linearly) transformed Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, and...

A fundamental component of inter-temporal consumption-saving and portfolio allocation models is a statistical model of the income process. While income processes are commonly unobservable income flows which evolve in continuous time, observable income data are usually discrete, having been...

In economics, rank-size regressions provide popular estimators of tail exponents of heavy-tailed distributions. We discuss the properties of this approach when the tail of the distribution is regularly varying rather than strictly Pareto. The estimator then over-estimates the true value in the...

We analyse why child poverty rates were much higher in Britain than in Western Germany during the 1990s, using a framework that focuses on poverty transition rates. Child poverty exit rates were significantly lower, and poverty entry rates significantly higher, in Britain. We decompose these...