One of the major drawbacks of multicarrier modulation is the large envelope fluctuations which either require an inefficient use of high power amplifiers or decrease the system performance. Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) is a very well known measure of the envelope fluctuations and has become the cost function used to evaluate and design multicarrier systems. Several PAPR-reducing techniques have been proposed with the aim to alleviate back-off specifications or increase the system performance. Besides the fact that these techniques have varying PAPR-reduction capabilities, power, bandwidth and complexity requirements, it is interesting to notice that the performance of a system employing these techniques has not been fully analyzed. In this paper we, first, develop a theoretical framework for both PAPR and the distortion introduced by a nonlinearity, and then simulate an OFDM system employing several well known PAPR-reducing techniques from the literature. By means of the theoretical analysis and the simulation results we will show the relation between PAPR and the performance of OFDM systems when a clipping device is present and we will evaluate the real performance improvement capabilities of the PAPR-reducing methods. The agreement between the theoretical and the simulation results demonstrate the validity of the analysis