An abundance of high quality data sets requiring heavy tailed models necessitates reliablemethods of estimating the shape parameter governing the degree of tail heaviness.The Hill estimator is a popular method for doing this but its practical use isencumbered by several difficulties. We show...

We use a subsample bootstrap method to get a consistent estimate of the asymptotically optimal choice of the samplefraction, in the sense of minimal mean squared error, which is needed for tail index estimation. Unlike previous methodsour procedure is fully self contained. In particular, the...