IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpmi/0408001.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Evidence for the Independence of Waged and Unwaged Income, Evidence for Boltzmann Distributions in Waged Income, and the Outlines of a Coherent Theory of Income Distribution

Author

Listed:
  • Geoff Willis

    (RiskAMT)

  • Juergen Mimkes

    (University of Paderborn)

Abstract

Two sets of high quality income data are analysed in detail, one set from the UK, one from the USA. It is firstly demonstrated that both a log-normal distribution and a Boltzmann distribution can give very accurate fits to both these data sets. The absence of a power tail in the US data set is then discussed. Taken in conjunction with detailed evidence from the UK and Japanese income data, a strong case is made for the mathematically separate treatment of waged and unwaged income. The authors present a case for preferring the use of the Boltzmann distribution over the log-normal function, this leads to a brief review of the work of a number of researchers, which shows that a coherent theory for the distribution of all income can be postulated.

Suggested Citation

  • Geoff Willis & Juergen Mimkes, 2004. "Evidence for the Independence of Waged and Unwaged Income, Evidence for Boltzmann Distributions in Waged Income, and the Outlines of a Coherent Theory of Income Distribution," Microeconomics 0408001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpmi:0408001
    Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 28
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/mic/papers/0408/0408001.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jean-Philippe Bouchaud & Marc Mezard, 2000. "Wealth condensation in a simple model of economy," Science & Finance (CFM) working paper archive 500026, Science & Finance, Capital Fund Management.
    2. Bouchaud, Jean-Philippe & Mézard, Marc, 2000. "Wealth condensation in a simple model of economy," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 282(3), pages 536-545.
    3. Wataru Souma, 2000. "Universal Structure of the Personal Income Distribution," Papers cond-mat/0011373, arXiv.org.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Arnab Chatterjee & Bikas K Chakrabarti, 2005. "Ideal-Gas Like Markets: Effect of Savings," Papers physics/0507136, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2005.
    2. Chakrabarti, Anindya S. & Chakrabarti, Bikas K., 2010. "Statistical theories of income and wealth distribution," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), vol. 4, pages 1-31.
    3. F. Clementi & M. Gallegati & G. Kaniadakis, 2007. "κ-generalized statistics in personal income distribution," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 57(2), pages 187-193, May.
    4. Venkat Venkatasubramanian, 2010. "What is Fair Pay for Executives? An Information Theoretic Analysis of Wage Distributions," Papers 1002.2269, arXiv.org.
    5. N. J. Moura & M. B. Ribeiro, 2009. "Evidence for the Gompertz curve in the income distribution of Brazil 1978–2005," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 67(1), pages 101-120, January.
    6. Fabio Clementi & Mauro Gallegati, 2005. "Pareto's Law of Income Distribution: Evidence for Grermany, the United Kingdom, and the United States," Microeconomics 0505006, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Geoff Willis, 2004. "Laser Welfare: First Steps in Econodynamic Engineering," Microeconomics 0408003, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Income distribution; log-normal; Boltzmann;

    JEL classification:

    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior
    • D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations
    • D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution
    • D4 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpmi:0408001. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (EconWPA). General contact details of provider: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.