Kurtosis is a statistical measure that describes the shape, or peakedness, of a probability distribution. It is a measure of the degree to which a distribution is more or less peaked than a normal distribution. A distribution with high kurtosis has a sharper peak and heavier tails than a normal distribution, while a distribution with low kurtosis has a flatter peak and lighter tails. Kurtosis is often used in finance and economics to analyze the distribution of returns on investments or financial instruments. It is also used in data analysis to detect outliers and to assess the normality of data distributions.