Traditional shock models view system failure time as a first passage problem. Yeh Lam proposed a new class of models called δ-shock models in which failure was dependent on the frequency of shocks. The present work generalizes Yeh Lam's results for renewal shock arrivals and random threshold....

In state legislative elections some candidates attract contributions from many donors whereas other candidates have much smaller donor pools. Why? What are the origins of these disparities? This paper conceptualizes contributions as a type of attachment between the donor and the state...

Significant differences in the evolution of firm size distribution for various industries in the United States have been revealed and documented. For theoretical considerations, this finding puts major constraints on the modelling of firm growth. For practical purposes, the observed differences...

This work presents a simple method for calculating deviations regarding city size and the size which would correspond to it with a Pareto exponent equal to one unit (Zipf’s Law). Recent works show that when considering the entire sample without size restrictions, the estimated Pareto exponent...

We consider a problem of characterization of continuous distributions for which linearity of regression of overlapping order statistics, <InlineEquation ID="IEq1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$\mathbb {E}(X_{i:m}|X_{j:n})=aX_{j:n}+b$$</EquationSource> <EquationSource Format="MATHML"> <math xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <mrow> <mi mathvariant="double-struck">E</mi> <mrow> <mo stretchy="false">(</mo> <msub> <mi>X</mi> <mrow> <mi>i</mi> <mo>:</mo> <mi>m</mi> </mrow> </msub> <mo stretchy="false">|</mo> <msub> <mi>X</mi> <mrow> <mi>j</mi> <mo>:</mo> <mi>n</mi> </mrow> </msub> <mo stretchy="false">)</mo> </mrow> <mo>=</mo> <mi>a</mi> <msub> <mi>X</mi> <mrow> <mi>j</mi> <mo>:</mo> <mi>n</mi> </mrow> </msub> <mo>+</mo> <mi>b</mi> </mrow> </math> </EquationSource> </InlineEquation>, <InlineEquation ID="IEq2"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$m\le n$$</EquationSource> <EquationSource Format="MATHML"> <math xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <mrow> <mi>m</mi> <mo>≤</mo> <mi>n</mi> </mrow> </math> </EquationSource> </InlineEquation>, holds. Due to a new...</equationsource></equationsource></inlineequation></equationsource></equationsource></inlineequation>

The analyses of wealth inequality based on survey data usually suffer from undercoverage of the upper percentiles of the very wealthy. Yet given this group’s substantial share of total net worth, it is of particular relevance. As no tax data are available in Germany, the largest fortunes can...

Standard risk metrics tend to underestimate the true risks of hedge funds becauseof serial correlation in the reported returns. Getmansky et al. (2004) derive mean,variance, Sharpe ratio, and beta formulae adjusted for serial correlation. Followingtheir lead, adjusted downside and global...

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

We provide a detailed analysis of a generalized proportional growth model (GPGM) of innovation and corporate dynamics that encompasses the Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect and the Simon growth process as particular instances. The predictions of the model are derived in terms of (i) firm...