Improved distances and ages for stars common to TGAS and RAVE
  We combine parallaxes from the first Gaia data release with the
spectrophotometric distance estimation framework for stars in the fifth RAVE
survey data release. The combined distance estimates are more accurate than
either determination in isolation - uncertainties are on average two times
smaller than for RAVE-only distances (three times smaller for dwarfs), and 1.4
times smaller than TGAS parallax uncertainties (two times smaller for giants).
We are also able to compare the estimates from spectrophotometry to those from
Gaia, and use this to assess the reliability of both catalogues and improve our
distance estimates. We find that the distances to the lowest log g stars are,
on average, overestimated and caution that they may not be reliable. We also
find that it is likely that the Gaia random uncertainties are smaller than the
reported values. As a byproduct we derive ages for the RAVE stars, many with
relative uncertainties less than 20 percent. These results for 219566 RAVE
sources have been made publicly available, and we encourage their use for
studies that combine the radial velocities provided by RAVE with the proper
motions provided by Gaia. A sample that we believe to be reliable can be found
by taking only the stars with the flag notification flag_any=0
