Related papers: Evolution of the personal income distribution in t…
The distribution of income and wealth in developed economies exhibits a robust two-class structure: an exponential (Boltzmann--Gibbs) bulk covering $\sim\!97\%$ of the population, and a power-law (Pareto) tail in the upper $\sim\!3\%$. We…
Economic competition between humans leads to income inequality, but, so far, there has been little understanding of underlying quantitative mechanisms governing such a collective behavior. We analyze datasets of household income from 67…
We analyze the household savings problem in a general setting where returns on assets, non-financial income and impatience are all state dependent and fluctuate over time. All three processes can be serially correlated and mutually…
The distribution of gross earnings of movies released each year show a distribution having a power-law tail with Pareto exponent $\alpha \simeq 2$. While this offers interesting parallels with income distributions of individuals, it is also…
This paper is part of the Global Income Dynamics Project cross-country comparison of earnings inequality, volatility, and mobility. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure…
The prominent inequality of wealth and income is a huge concern especially in the United States. The likelihood of diminishing poverty is one valid reason to reduce the world's surging level of economic inequality. The principle of…
In this article we present an alternative model for the distribution of household incomes in the United States. We provide arguments from two differing perspectives which both yield the proposed income distribution curve, and then fit this…
This study explores the link between the capital share and income inequality over the past four decades across 56 countries. Calculating the capital share from national accounts alongside top income share data from the World Inequality…
Survey data are widely used to study how income inequality, poverty, and welfare evolve over time. A common practice is to estimate the income distribution separately for each year, treating annual observations as independent…
We introduce a simple model of economy, where the time evolution is described by an equation capturing both exchange between individuals and random speculative trading, in such a way that the fundamental symmetry of the economy under an…
We use a controlled laboratory experiment to study the causal impact of income decreases within a time period on redistribution decisions at the end of that period, in an environment where we keep fixed the sum of incomes over the period.…
We investigate the accumulated wealth distribution by adopting evolutionary games taking place on scale-free networks. The system self-organizes to a critical Pareto distribution (1897) of wealth $P(m)\sim m^{-(v+1)}$ with $1.6 < v <2.0$…
We estimate capital and labor income Pareto exponents across 475 country-year observations that span 52 countries over half a century (1967-2018). We document two stylized facts: (i) capital income is more unequally distributed than labor…
Using public data (Forbes Global 2000) we show that the asset sizes for the largest global firms follow a Pareto distribution in an intermediate range, that is ``interrupted'' by a sharp cut-off in its upper tail, where it is totally…
This study considers a model of the income distribution of agents whose pairwise interaction is asymmetric and price-invariant. Asymmetric transactions are typical for chain-trading groups who arrange their business such that commodities…
The rich-get-richer mechanism (agents increase their ``wealth'' randomly at a rate proportional to their holdings) is often invoked to explain the Pareto power-law distribution observed in many physical situations, such as the degree…
The higher-end tail of the wealth distribution in India is studied using recently published lists of the wealth of richest Indians between the years 2002-4. The resulting rank distribution seems to imply a power-law tail for the wealth…
This article describes mathematical methods for estimating the top-tail of the wealth distribution and therefrom the share of total wealth that the richest $p$ percent hold, which is an intuitive measure of inequality. As the data base for…
Mounting evidences are being gathered suggesting that income and wealth distribution in various countries or societies follow a robust pattern, close to the Gibbs distribution of energy in an ideal gas in equilibrium, but also deviating…
This article addresses the origins of income inequality in post-socialist countries from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from 1991 to 2016. The aim is to analyze the relationship between democracy and income inequality. In…