Recent empirical studies have shown that firm growth rate distribution is not Gaussian but closely follows a Laplace distribution. This robust feature of the growth rate distribution challenges ...

One of the main models in industrial organisation assumes that firms grow in a response to many small shocks that satisfy the central limit theorem. This column shows that if the shocks do not follow ...

Everyone agrees the normal distribution isn't a great statistical model for stock market returns, but no generally accepted alternative has emerged. A bottom-up simulation points to the Laplace ...