Skip to content

[heavy_tail] Update editorial suggestions #425

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
merged 2 commits into from
Apr 19, 2024
Merged

[heavy_tail] Update editorial suggestions #425

Changes from 1 commit
Commits
Show all changes
2 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
5c01d23
[heavy_tail] Update editorial suggestions
SylviaZhaooo Apr 18, 2024
a4ca83e
misc
jstac Apr 19, 2024
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
Prev Previous commit
misc
  • Loading branch information
@jstac
jstac committed Apr 19, 2024
commit a4ca83e1ae96f0c5c7a6a2dac6fa23da65592616
12 changes: 8 additions & 4 deletions lectures/heavy_tails.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -39,13 +39,17 @@ register_matplotlib_converters()

## Overview

Studying heavy-tailed distributions is essential for accurately comprehending real-world phenomena.
Heavy-tailed distributions are a class of distributions that generate "extreme" outcomes.

Unlike standard Gaussian distributions, heavy-tailed distributions account for extreme events with greater probabilities.
In the natural sciences (and in more traditional economics courses), heavy-tailed distributions are seen as quite exotic and non-standard.

This understanding is crucial in analyzing wealth, firm size, and city size distributions, as well as other areas such as business cycles and political economy.
However, it turns out that heavy-tailed distributions play a crucial role in economics.

In fact many -- if not most -- of the important distributions in economics are heavy tailed.

In this lecture we explain what heavy tails are and why they are -- or at least
why they should be -- central to economic analysis.

In this section we give some motivation for the lecture.

### Introduction: light tails

Expand Down