Colloquium: Statistical mechanics of money, wealth, and income
By Victor M. Yakovenko, J. Barkley Rosser Jr.. 2009
504 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This Colloquium reviews statistical models for money, wealth, and income distributions developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. By analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy in physics, it is shown that the probability distribution of money is exponential for certain classes of models with interacting economic agents. Alternative scenarios are also reviewed. Data analysis of the empirical distributions of wealth and income reveals a two-class distribution. The majority of the population belongs to the lower class, characterized by the exponential ("thermal") distribution, whereas a small fraction of the population in the upper class is characterized by the power-law ("superthermal") distribution. The lower part is very stable, stationary in time, whereas the upper part is highly dynamical and out of equilibrium.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4bbc9824bf68577aba977762db2238b4daafdae0
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In Economics and Econometrics
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Universal patterns of inequality (2009, background): “6 One of the important concepts in thermodynamics is the distinction between heat and work.”