Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/40691 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
Kiel Working Paper No. 1648
Publisher: 
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.
Subjects: 
power law
estimation
tail index
JEL: 
C16
C46
C63
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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