  We use techniques from soft-collinear effective theory (SCET) to derive
renormalization-group improved predictions for single-particle inclusive (1PI)
observables in top-quark pair production at hadron colliders. In particular, we
study the top-quark transverse-momentum and rapidity distributions, the
forward-backward asymmetry at the Tevatron, and the total cross section at
NLO+NNLL order in resummed perturbation theory and at approximate NNLO in fixed
order. We also perform a detailed analysis of power corrections to the leading
terms in the threshold expansion of the partonic hard-scattering kernels. We
conclude that, although the threshold expansion in 1PI kinematics is
susceptible to numerically significant power corrections, its predictions for
the total cross section are in good agreement with those obtained by
integrating the top-pair invariant-mass distribution in pair invariant-mass
kinematics, as long as a certain set of subleading terms appearing naturally
within the SCET formalism is included.
