Some Distributions of Sample Means

It is shown that certain monomials in normally distributed quantities have stable distributions with index 2^-k. This provides, for k > 1, simple examples where the mean of a sample has a distribution equivalent to that of a fixed, arbitrarily large multiple of a single observation. These examples include distributions symmetrical about zero, and positive distributions. Using these examples, it is shown that any distribution with a very long tail (of average order x^-3/2) has the distributions of its sample means grow flatter and flatter as the sample size increases. Thus the sample mean provides less information than a single value. Stronger results are proved for still longer tails.