The hypothesis that the legalisation of abortion contributed significantly to the reduction of crime in the United States in 1990s is one of the most prominent ideas from the recent “economics-made-fun” movement sparked by the book Freakonomics. This paper expands on the existing literature...

The hypothesis that the legalisation of abortion contributed significantly to the reduction of crime in the United States in 1990s is one of the most prominent ideas from the recent “economics-made-fun” movement sparked by the book Freakonomics. This paper expands on the existing literature...

The Pareto distribution is often used in many areas of economics to model the right tail of heavy-tailed distributions. However, the standard method of estimating the shape parameter (the Pareto index) of this distribution – the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) – is non-robust, in the...