Christian Kleiber

R is a language and environment for data analysis and graphics. It may be considered an implementation of S, an award-winning language initially - veloped at Bell Laboratories since the late 1970s. The R project was initiated by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in the early 1990s, and has been developed by an international team since mid-1997. Historically, econometricians have favored other computing environments, some of which have fallen by the wayside, and also a variety of packages with canned routines. We believe that R has great potential in econometrics, both for research and for teaching. There are at least three reasons for this: (1) R is mostly platform independent and runs on Microsoft Windows, the Mac family of operating systems, and various ?avors of Unix/Linux, and also on some more exotic platforms. (2) R is free software that can be downloaded and installed at no cost from a family of mirror sites around the globe, the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN); hence students can easily install it on their own machines. (3) R is open-source software, so that the full source code is available and can be inspected to understand what it really does, learn from it, and modify and extend it. We also like to think that platform independence and the open-source philosophy make R an ideal environment for reproducible econometric research.

A comprehensive account of economic size distributions around the world and throughout the years In the course of the past 100 years, economists and applied statisticians have developed a remarkably diverse variety of income distribution models, yet no single resource convincingly accounts for all of these models, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, similarities and differences. Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences is the first collection to systematically investigate a wide variety of parametric models that deal with income, wealth, and related notions. Christian Kleiber and Samuel Kotz survey, compliment, compare, and unify all of the disparate models of income distribution, highlighting at times a lack of coordination between them that can result in unnecessary duplication. Considering models from eight languages and all continents, the authors discuss the social and economic implications of each as well as distributions of size of loss in actuarial applications. Specific models covered include: *Pareto distributions *Lognormal distributions *Gamma-type size distributions *Beta-type size distributions *Miscellaneous size distributions Three appendices provide brief biographies of some of the leading players along with the basic properties of each of the distributions. Actuaries, economists, market researchers, social scientists, and physicists interested in econophysics will find Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences to be a truly one-of-a-kind addition to the professional literature.