Abstract
There seems to be widespread agreement on the functional form of wealth and income distributions observing a power law tail [3, 13, 9, 14], while the left part of wealth and income distributions is somewhat more controversial and typically found to follow an exponential or Gamma-like distribution [1, 3, 13, 11]. The presentations by Clementi, Galegatti, Fujiwara, Souma, Sinha, and Yakovenko at this conference certainly point in the same direction but the evidence on income distributions clearly outweighs that on wealth—which is hardly surprising because it is much easier to observe income flows than the stock of wealth. None the less, we would like to focus our attention on the distribution of wealth and argue that the observed distributional regularities are statistical equilibrium outcomes of two distinct economic processes.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Dagum C, Zenga M (1990) Income and Wealth Distribution, Inequality and Poverty, Springer-Verlag, Berlin
Davies JB, Shorrocks AF (2000), The Distribution of Wealth, Handbook of Income Distribution, Eds. Atkinson AB, Bourguignon F, Elsevier Science BV, Amsterdam
Drăgulescu AA, Yakovenko VM (2001) Exponential and Power Law Probability Distributions of Wealth and Income in the UK and US, Physica A 299:213–221
Folbre N (1995) The New Field Guide to the U.S. Economy, The New Press, New York
Foley DK (1994) A Statistical Equilibrium Theory of Markets, Journal of Economic Theory, 62:321–345
Jaynes ET (1989) Where Do We Stand on Maximum Entropy? in Rosenkrantz RD Ed. E. T. Jaynes: Papers on Probability, Statistics and Statistical Physics, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands
Kapur JN (1989) Maximum-Entropy Models in Science and Engineering, John Wiley & Sons, New York
Kapur JN, Kesavan HK (1992) Entropy Optimization Principles with Applications, Academic Press, San Diego
Levy M, Solomon S (1997) New Evidence for the Power Law Distribution of Wealth, Physica A 242:90–94
Milaković M (2003) Towards a Statistical Equilibrium Theory of Wealth Distribution, Ph. D Thesis, New School University, New York
Persky JJ (1992) Pareto’s Law, Journal of Economic Perspectives 6:181–192
Shorrocks AF (1982) The Portfolio Composition of Asset Holdings in the UK, Economic Journal 92:268–284
Silva AC, Yakovenko VM (2005) Temporal Evolution of the “Thermal” and “Superthermal” Income Classes in the USA during 1983–2001, Europhysics Letters 69:304–310
Wolff EN (1987) Ed. International Comparisons of the Distribution of Household Wealth, Oxford University Press, New York
Wolff EN (1996) Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done about It, The New Press, New York
Wolff EN (2000) Why Has Median Wealth Grown So Slowly in the 1990s? Working Paper, New York University, November.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Italia
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Milaković, M. (2005). Do We All Face the Same Constraints?. In: Chatterjee, A., Yarlagadda, S., Chakrabarti, B.K. (eds) Econophysics of Wealth Distributions. New Economic Windows. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/88-470-0389-X_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/88-470-0389-X_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Milano
Print ISBN: 978-88-470-0329-3
Online ISBN: 978-88-470-0389-7
eBook Packages: Business and EconomicsEconomics and Finance (R0)