Since Mandelbrot's seminal work (1963), alpha-stable distributions with infinite variance have been regarded as a more realistic distributional assumption than the normal distribution for some economic variables, especially financial data. After providing a brief survey of theoretical results on...

In this paper, using the Monte Carlo (MC) method we propose an estimation and (at the same time) a test procedure for the stability parameter of α-stable distributions. One powerful advantage of the MC method is that it provides an exact significance level for finite samples, whose distribution...