We argue against the view that it is mostly the peaks of the empirical densities of stock returns (and of other risky returns as well) that set such data aside from ‘normal’ variables. We show that peaks depend on sample size and on the way returns are standardized, and that for given data...

We consider empirical autocorrelations of residuals from infinite variance autoregressive processes. Unlike the finite-variance case, it emerges that the limiting distribution, after suitable normalization, is not always more concentrated around zero when residuals rather than true innovations...