Bias - Corrected Maximum Likelihood Estimation of the Parameters of the Generalized Pareto Distribution

We derive analytic expressions for the biases, to O(n-1) of the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters of the generalized Pareto distribution. Using these expressions to bias-correct the estimators is found to be extremely effective in terms of bias reduction, and generally results in some reduction in relative mean squared error. The analytic bias-corrected estimators are also shown to be dramatically superior to the alternative of bias-correction via the bootstrap.