dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaHow Do Output Growth Rate Distributions Look Like? Some Time-Series Evidence on OECD Countries
| Authors | Giorgio Fagiolo, Mauro Napoletano, Andrea Roventini |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | physics/0607180 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0607180 |
Abstract
This paper investigates the statistical properties of within-country GDP and industrial production (IP) growth rate distributions. Many empirical contributions have recently pointed out that cross-section growth rates of firms, industries and countries all follow Laplace distributions. In this work, we test whether also within-country, time-series GDP and IP growth rates can be approximated by tent-shaped distributions. We fit output growth rates with the exponential-power (Subbotin) family of densities, which includes as particular cases both the Gaussian and the Laplace distributions. We find that, for a large number of OECD countries including the U.S., both GDP and IP growth rates are Laplace distributed. Moreover, we show that fat-tailed distributions robustly emerge even after controlling for outliers, autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity.
{
"annotation_id": "9df6b47c-c236-4230-8c4c-8a6357fe9dc3",
"date_created": "2026-03-02T18:01:10.254000Z",
"date_modified": "2026-03-02T18:01:10.254000Z",
"file_hash": "6c9c8d2cbf8f220bebef3ac366627689cc372125b6dd5d11cb8912af33524256",
"private": false,
"record": {
"abstract": "This paper investigates the statistical properties of within-country GDP and\nindustrial production (IP) growth rate distributions. Many empirical\ncontributions have recently pointed out that cross-section growth rates of\nfirms, industries and countries all follow Laplace distributions. In this work,\nwe test whether also within-country, time-series GDP and IP growth rates can be\napproximated by tent-shaped distributions. We fit output growth rates with the\nexponential-power (Subbotin) family of densities, which includes as particular\ncases both the Gaussian and the Laplace distributions. We find that, for a\nlarge number of OECD countries including the U.S., both GDP and IP growth rates\nare Laplace distributed. Moreover, we show that fat-tailed distributions\nrobustly emerge even after controlling for outliers, autocorrelation and\nheteroscedasticity.",
"arxiv_id": "physics/0607180",
"authors": [
"Giorgio Fagiolo",
"Mauro Napoletano",
"Andrea Roventini"
],
"categories": [
"physics.soc-ph",
"q-fin.GN"
],
"title": "How Do Output Growth Rate Distributions Look Like? Some Time-Series Evidence on OECD Countries",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0607180"
},
"schema_id": "dorsal/arxiv",
"source": {
"execution_id": "267fb131-e6a7-4970-aaf1-ca733b78c3a3",
"id": "arXiv Dataset IDs",
"type": "Model",
"variant": "snapshot-2026-03-01",
"version": "0.1.0"
},
"user_id": 1000002
}