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...

We compute confidence intervals for recursive impact factors, that take into account that some citations are more prestigious than others, as well as for the associated ranks of journals, applying the methods to the population of economics journals. The Quarterly Journal of Economics is clearly...

We follow a long path for Credit Derivatives and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) in particular, from the introduction of the Gaussian copula model and the related implied correlations to the introduction of arbitrage-free dynamic loss models capable of calibrating all the tranches for all...

This paper presents the first global and regional estimates of polarization and bipolarization spanning the period 1960-2020. The study relies on group data to implement a flexible parametric model to obtain the global income distribution and polarization estimates. The study introduces a...

Granted, it is generally understood that using past performance as the basis for either choosing an investment alternative or for selecting a particular configuration of a given alternative poses the risk of mistaking chance outperformance for something that might endure. But if many of the...

A class of mean reverting positive stochastic processes driven by alpha-stable distributions, 1=alpha2, are discussed. They are referred to as alpha-root processes in analogy to the square root process or the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross process derived from the Brownian motion. They are affine models in...

Statistical distribution of Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is characteristically asymmetric and non-mesokurtic. Even the distribution of log10(JIF) exhibits conspicuous skewness and non-mesokurticity. In this paper we estimate the parameters of Johnson SU distribution fitting to the log10(JIF) data...

In the present document it is exposed in an abstract way the models of credit portfolioes CreditMetricsTM, KMV, CreditRisk+, Credit Portfolio View in such a way that they could be calibrated and implemented in financial institutions where the quality and quantity of credit information is scanty,...

The most widely used measure of segregation is the dissimilarity index, D. It is now well understood that this measure also reflects randomness in the allocation of individuals to units; that is, it measures deviations from evenness not deviations from randomness. This leads to potentially large...

The paper tackles the issue of possible misspecification in fitting skew normal distributions to empirical data. It is shown, through numerical experiments, that it is easy to choose a distribution which is different from this which actually generated the sample, if the minimum distance...