Related papers: Universal patterns of inequality
In simulations of some economic gas-like models, the asymptotic regime shows an exponential wealth distribution, independently of the initial wealth distribution given to the system. The appearance of this statistical equilibrium for this…
This article reviews the economics literature of, primarily, the last 20 years, that studies the link between income shocks and consumption fluctuations at the household level. We identify three broad approaches through which researchers…
We first describe a general class of optimization problems that describe many natural, economic, and statistical phenomena. After noting the existence of a conserved quantity in a transformed coordinate system, we outline several instances…
The method of optimizing entropy is used to (i) conduct Asymptotic Hypothesis Testing and (ii) determine the particle distribution for which Entropy is maximized. This paper focuses on two related applications of Information Theory:…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
In this paper we explore the dynamic relationship between income inequality and economic mobility through a pairing of a population-scale partial differential equation (PDE) model and an associated individual-based stochastic differential…
The vast majority of travel takes place within cities. Recently, new data has become available which allows for the discovery of urban mobility patterns which differ from established results about long distance travel. Specifically, the…
We present a stochastic agent-based model for the distribution of personal incomes in a developing economy. We start with the assumption that incomes are determined both by individual labour and by stochastic effects of trading and…
The nexus between debt and inequality has attracted considerable scholarly attention in the wake of the global financial crisis. One prominent candidate to explain the striking co-evolution of income inequality and private debt in this…
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 weak law of large numbers implies that, under mild assumptions on the source, the Renyi entropy per produced symbol converges (in probability) towards the Shannon entropy rate. This paper quantifies the speed of this convergence for…
Maximum-entropy distributions are shown to appear in the probability calculus as approximations of a model by exchangeability or a model by sufficiency, the former model being preferable. The implications of this fact are discussed,…
The atmosphere gains available potential energy by solar radiation and dissipates kinetic energy mainly in the atmospheric boundary layer. We analyze the fluctuations of the global mean energy cycle defined by Lorenz (1955) in a simulation…
Some general considerations on the notion of entropy in physics are presented. An attempt is made to clarify the question of the differentiation between physical entropy (the Clausius-Boltzmann one) and quantities called entropies…
The impact of rising consumption on wealth inequality remains an open question. Here we revisit and extend the Social Architecture of Capitalism agent-based model proposed by Ian Wright, which reproduces stylized facts of wealth and income…
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…
Statistical physics aims to describe properties of macroscale systems in terms of distributions of their microscale agents. Its central tool is the maximization of entropy, a variational principle. We review the history of this principle,…
In the present work we study the relationship between population allocation and the combined effects of urban size and energy consumption, for two given areas and through a major part of the twentieth century. Along these lines a general…
The power law is ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena, and is considered as a universal relationship between the frequency and its rank for diverse social systems. However, a general model is still lacking to interpret why these…
Statistical Physics, Diffusion Entropy Analysis and Information Theory commonly use Mathai's entropy which measures the randomness of probability laws, whereas welfare economics and the Social Sciences commonly use Gini index which measures…