Power Laws and Inequalities: The Case of British District House Price Dispersion

David Paul Gray ()
Additional contact information
David Paul Gray: Department of Accountancy Finance and Economics, University of Lincoln, Lincoln LN6 7TS, UK

Risks, 2023, vol. 11, issue 7, 1-15

Abstract: Descriptive statistics that are easy to generate and interpret are central to policy decision making. The GINI coefficient and the coefficient of variation are used widely when assessing inequality. In many areas of inequality, such as wealth and income holdings, the distribution is skewed. Here, simple power laws could provide useful ‘descriptive’ exponents. The Zipf-Pareto power law and Lavalette’s law are used to reveal a steepening in the distribution of district house prices in Britain that began before the financial crash of 2008. The time profiles indicate the exponents closely mirror those of the GINI coefficient and the coefficient of variation. As such, they are useful tools in the quantification of inequalities.

Keywords: quintile ratio; house price in Britain; Lavalette’s law; inequality; coefficient of variation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C G0 G1 G2 G3 K2 M2 M4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9091/11/7/136/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9091/11/7/136/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jrisks:v:11:y:2023:i:7:p:136-:d:1199398

Access Statistics for this article

Risks is currently edited by Mr. Claude Zhang

More articles in Risks from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().