This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget shares distributions (HBSDs) - defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities - for a large sample of Italian households in the period...

In this paper we explore the statistical properties of the distributions of consumption expenditures for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. Goodness-of-fit tests show that household aggregate (and age-conditioned) consumption distributions are not log-normal. Rather,...

If business firms face a multiplicative growth process in which their growth rates are independent from their sizes, then these sizes cannot be distributed according to a stationary Pareto distribution. At the same time , the Laplace distribution of growth rates cannot be easily reconciled with...

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...

This work brings together two distinct pieces of evidence concerning, at the macro level, international distributions of incomes and their dynamics, and, at the micro level, the size distributions of firms and the properties of their growth rates. First, our empirical analysis provides a new...

Since the seminal work of Pareto, many empirical analyses suggested that the distribution of firms size is characterized by an asymptotic power like behavior. At the same time, recent investigations show that the distribution of annual growth rates of business firms displays a remarkable...

We introduce a new 5-parameter family of distributions, the Asymmetric Exponential Power (AEP), able to cope with asymmetries and leptokurtosis and at the same time allowing for a continuous variation from non-normality to normality. We prove that the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimates of the AEP...

This paper performs an empirical analysis of the international cross sectional distribution of gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates and business cycles. We consider a balanced panel of 91 countries in the period 1960-2010 and two different measures of GDP fluctuations: the logarithmic...

Recent empirical analyses on different datasets have revealed a common exponential behaviour in the shape of the probability density of the corporate growth rates. We briefly review these analyses and present new evidence on this topic based on corporate data from Italian Manufacturing Industry....