Extreme value theory as a theoretical background for power law behavior

Simone Alfarano and Thomas Lux

No 1648, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: Power law behavior has been recognized to be a pervasive feature of many phenomena in natural and social sciences. While immense research efforts have been devoted to the analysis of behavioural mechanisms responsible for the ubiquity of power-law scaling, the strong theoretical foundation of power laws as a very general type of limiting behavior of large realizations of stochastic processes is less well known. In this paper, we briefly present some of the key results of extreme value theory, which provide a statistical justification for the emergence of power laws as limiting behavior for extreme fluctuations. The remarkable generality of the theory allows to abstract from the details of the system under investigation, and therefore allows its application in many diverse fields. Moreover, this theory offers new powerful techniques for the estimation of the Pareto index, detailed in the second part of this chapter.

Keywords: power law; estimation; tail index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C16 C46 C63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Extreme value theory as a theoretical background for power law behavior (2011)
Working Paper: Extreme Value Theory as a Theoretical Background for Power Law Behavior (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwkwp:1648

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