This article is an exploratory investigation of the distributional properties of market index returns using J. W. Tukey's g and h distributions. Specifically, it is shown that over sufficiently long periods of time, the distribution of the market index is adequately explained as a skewed,...

This article explores the nature of skewness and elongation in daily common-stock-return distributions of individual firms using estimates of g (for skewness) and h (for elongation) obtained form Turkey's g and h distributions. Both parametric and nonparametric (bootstrap) estimates of standard...