The Two-Piece Normal-Laplace Distribution

This article considers the two-piece normal-Laplace (TPNL) distribution, a split skew distribution consisting of a normal part, and a Laplace part. The distribution is indexed by three parameters, representing location, scale, and shape. As illustrated with several examples, the TPNL family of distributions provides a useful alternative to other families of asymmetric distributions on the real line. However, because the likelihood function is not well behaved, standard theory of maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation does not apply to the TPNL family. In particular, the likelihood function can have multiple local maxima. We provide a procedure for computing ML estimators, and prove consistency and asymptotic normality of ML estimators, using non standard methods.