Superstars without talent? The Yule distribution controversy

Laura Spierdijk and Mark Voorneveld
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Laura Spierdijk: Dept. of Econometrics, University of Groningen

No 658, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: Chung and Cox (1994) provided an intuitively appealing stochastic model which indicates that superstars may exist regardless of talent and which gives rise to the Yule distribution. We adopt a different empirical approach and test its goodness-of-fit using a parametric bootstrap and several powerful test statistics. Just like the discrete Pareto distribution, it is overwhelmingly rejected: it is a fairly accurate approximation of the lower quantiles of the superstar distribution, but overestimates the snowball effect that makes consumers purchase records of the most successful artists. In other words, the Yule distribution captures stardom, but not superstardom. A generalization of the Yule distribution provides an excellent fit in two of the three data sets.

Keywords: Superstardom; Yule distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 L82 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2007-04-25, Revised 2007-12-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul and nep-ecm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Superstars without Talent? The Yule Distribution Controversy (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hastef:0658

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