Certainly, the concept of skewness of returns and its role in the context of portfolio analysis has gained increasing attention in recent literature. Witness the studies by Alderfer and Bierman [1], Arditti [2, 3], Jean [4], and Simonson [5]. Each of these studies has treated skewness as the third moment of a series expansion—accordingly, skewness has been measured and interpreted as a logical extension of the traditional two-dimensional return-versus-standard deviation analysis of security evaluation.

egalitarian than the slave South or urban areas of its time, it does not follow that this region represented a classic egalitarian society. Although wealth was greater in the older, more settled areas of the country, the median wealthholding, particularly in the nonslave states, was remarkably uniform across states, suggesting that migration took place from households lying toward the middle of the eastern states' wealth distributions, which together with the flow of immigrants would explain both the similarities between East and West and the differences in wealth patterns and in the social and demographic characteristics of the wealthholders. The patterns of age and wealth accumulation were consistent with the Life Cycle hypothesis, while the social characteristics of the wealthholders are consistent with a hypothesis of racial and sexual discrimination. To be wealthy in this egalitarian society of historical tradition was to be a middle-aged, native-born, white, literate, male farmer.