Exponential and power-law probability distributions of wealth and income in the United Kingdom and the United States

By A. Drăgulescu, Victor M. Yakovenko. 2001

512 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 exponential distribution, whereas the high-end tail follows a power law. The distributions are characterized by a dimensional scale analogous to temperature. The values of temperature are determined for the UK and the USA, as well as for the individual states of the USA.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/204b236a00d4ddc8f64125bad6f7bf9d2b1010f4

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

On Steady Distributions of Kinetic Models of Conservative Economies (2008, background): “Econophysics, Boltzmann equation, wealth and income distributions, Pareto distribution.”
Econophysics: Empirical facts and agent-based models (2009, unknown): “The Γ-distribution is characterized by a mode xm > 0, in agreement with real data of wealth and income distributions (Dragulescu and Yakovenko (2001a); Ferrero (2004); Silva and Yakovenko (2005); Sala-i Martin and Mohapatra (2002); Sala-i Martin (2002); Aoyama et al. (2003)).”
Pareto's Law of Income Distribution: Evidence for Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States (2005, background): “Using data coming from several parts of the world, a number of recent studies debate whether the low-middle income range of the income distribution may be fitted by an exponential [ 1-8 ] or lognormal [9-13] decreasing function.4”
Econophysics review: II. Agent-based models (2011, unknown): “those by Dragulescu and Yakovenko ( 2001a , b ) for the UK and US, by Fujiwara et al.”
Power law tails in the Italian personal income distribution (2004, background): “and Japan from 1960 to 1999, but find that the middle portion of the income distribution has rather an exponential form; the same is proposed by [5] for the U.”
Universal patterns of inequality (2009, background): “Drăgulescu and Yakovenko [14] found α = 1.”