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[heavy_tail] Update editorial suggestions
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SylviaZhaooo committed Apr 18, 2024
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## Overview

Studying heavy-tailed distributions is essential for accurately comprehending real-world phenomena.

Unlike standard Gaussian distributions, heavy-tailed distributions account for extreme events with greater probabilities.

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.

In this section we give some motivation for the lecture.

### Introduction: light tails
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Putting this another way, light-tailed distributions are those that
rarely generate extreme values.

(A more formal definition is given below.)
(A more formal definition is given [below](https://intro.quantecon.org/heavy_tails.html#light-and-heavy-tails).)

Many statisticians and econometricians
use rules of thumb such as "outcomes more than four or five
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distribution:

```{code-cell} ipython3
r = np.random.standard_t(df=5, size=1000)
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.hist(r, bins=60, alpha=0.4, label='bitcoin returns', density=True)
xmin, xmax = plt.xlim()
x = np.linspace(xmin, xmax, 100)
p = norm.pdf(x, np.mean(r), np.std(r))
ax.plot(x, p, 'k', linewidth=2, label='normal distribution')
ax.set_xlabel('returns', fontsize=12)
ax.legend()
plt.show()
```

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* forecasting
* taxation (across a heavy-tailed income distribution), etc.

We return to these points below.
We return to these points [below](https://intro.quantecon.org/heavy_tails.html#why-do-heavy-tails-matter).






## Visual comparisons
In this section, we will introduce important concepts such as the Pareto distribution, Counter CDFs, and Power laws, which aid in recognizing heavy-tailed distributions.

Later we will provide a mathematical definition of the difference between
light and heavy tails.
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As with the CCDF, the empirical CCDF from the Pareto distributions is
approximately linear in a log-log plot.

We will use this idea below when we look at real data.
We will use this idea [below](https://intro.quantecon.org/heavy_tails.html#heavy-tails-in-economic-cross-sections) when we look at real data.


### Power laws
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