The issue of estimating the persistence of a dynamic process arises frequently in many micro and macro applied exercises. In this note we study the statistical properties of a simple index of persistence. We show that the index is normally-distributed and we estimate its expected value and...

Recent empirical findings suggest that macroeconomic variables are seldom normally distributed. For example, the distributions of aggregate output growth-rate time series of many OECD countries are well approximated by symmetric exponential-power (EP) densities, with Laplace fat tails. In this...

This work explores some distributional properties of aggregate output growth-rate time series. We show that, in the majority of OECD countries, output growth-rate distributions are well-approximated by symmetric exponential-power densities with tails much fatter than those of a Gaussian. Fat...

In this paper we study a class of evolutionary models of industrial agglomeration with local positive feedbacks, which allow for a wide set of empirically-testable implications. Their roots rest in the Generalized Polya Urn framework. Here, however, we build on a birth-death process over a...

This work explores the spatial distribution of productive activities in the Italian manufacturing industry. We propose an econometric model which tries to disentangle locationspecific from sectoral drivers in the dynamic process of spatial agglomeration. The basic idea is that the former...

We study the impact of alternative detrending techniques on the distributional properties of U.S. output time series. We detrend GDP and industrial production time series employing first-differencing, Hodrick-Prescott and bandpass filters. We show that the resulting distributions can be...

Recent empirical findings suggest that macroeconomic variables are seldom normally dis- tributed. For example, the distributions of aggregate output growth-rate time series of many OECD countries are well approximated by symmetric exponential-power (EP) den- sities, with Laplace fat tails. In...

In this paper we study a class of evolutionary models of industrial agglomeration with local positive feedbacks, which allow for a wide set of empirically-testable implications. Their roots rest in the Generalized Polya Urn framework. Here, however, we build on a birth-death process over a...

This work explores some distributional properties of aggregate output growth-rate time series. We show that, in the majority of OECD countries, output growth-rate distributions are well-approximated by symmetric exponential-power densities with tails much fatter than those of a Gaussian. Fat...

We study the impact of alternative detrending techniques on the distributional properties of U.S. output time series. We detrend GDP and industrial production time series employing first-differencing, Hodrick-Prescott and bandpass filters. We show that the resulting distributions can be...