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Abstract
New methods have been devised for fitting skewed statistical distributions that conform to
a double exponential model. Such distributions characterize a large class of phenomena
of interest to agricultural economists. Distributions of data involving rainfall, temperature,
crop yields, crop-hail losses, and others follow this pattern,. The new technique,
under the name of the theory of extreme values, makes use of graphics and is much less
complex and time-consuming than older methods. But most of the available literature is
highly mathematical and not easily understood. This paper presents a nonmathematical
explanation for the working agricultural economist.