Related papers: Exponential Structure of Income Inequality: Eviden…
This article is a supplement to my main contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Complexity Economics (2023). On the basis of three recent papers, it presents an unconventional perspective on economic inequality from a statistical physics…
Probability distributions of money, income, and energy consumption per capita are studied for ensembles of economic agents. The principle of entropy maximization for partitioning of a limited resource gives exponential distributions for the…
A common assumption in the literature is that the level of income inequality shapes individuals' beliefs about whether the income distribution is fair (``fairness views,'' for short). However, individuals do not directly observe income…
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…
The aim of this work is to establish the personal income distribution from the elementary constituents of a free market; products of a representative good and agents forming the economic network. The economy is treated as a self-organized…
The first part of this paper is a brief survey of the approaches to economic inequality based on ideas from statistical physics and kinetic theory. These include the Boltzmann kinetic equation, the time-reversal symmetry, the ergodicity…
A society or country with income equally distributed among its people is truly a fiction! The phenomena of socioeconomic inequalities have been plaguing mankind from times immemorial. We are interested in gaining an insight about the…
General equilibrium equations in economics play the same role with many-body Newtonian equations in physics. Accordingly, each solution of the general equilibrium equations can be regarded as a possible microstate of the economic system.…
We present the data on wealth and income distributions in the United Kingdom, as well as on the income distributions in the individual states of the USA. In all of these data, we find that the great majority of population is described by an…
The evolution of personal income distribution (PID) in four countries: Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA follows a unique trajectory. We have revealed precise match in the shape of two age-dependent features of the PID: mean income…
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…
Concern about income inequality has become prominent in public discourse around the world. However, studies in behavioral economics and psychology have consistently shown that people prefer not equal but fair income distributions. Thus,…
A computational model for the distribution of wealth among the members of an ideal society is presented. It is determined that a realistic distribution of wealth depends upon two mechanisms: an asymmetric flux of wealth in trading…
Income inequality and redistribution policies are modeled with a minimal, endogenous model of a simple foraging economy. Significant income inequalities emerge from the model for populations of equally capable individuals presented with…
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…
A country's mix of products predicts its subsequent pattern of diversification and economic growth. But does this product mix also predict income inequality? Here we combine methods from econometrics, network science, and economic…
We analyze three sets of income data: the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics PSID), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). It is shown that the empirical income distribution is consistent with…
Pareto's law states that the distribution of personal income obeys a power-law in the high-income range, and has been supported by international observations. Researchers have proposed models over a century since its discovery. However, the…
We analyze the cumulative distribution of total personal income of USA counties, and gross domestic product of Brazilian, German and United Kingdom counties, and also of world countries. We verify that generalized exponential distributions,…
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…