Assessment of goodness of fit of income distribution in France and Germany based on the Zenga distribution

Małgorzata Ćwiek () and Kamila Trzcińska ()
Additional contact information
Małgorzata Ćwiek: Cracow University of Economics
Kamila Trzcińska: University of Lodz

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2023, vol. 57, issue 5, No 5, 4013-4027

Abstract: Abstract The aim of this paper is to apply the Zenga distribution for equivalent disposable income from the last two waves of European Quality of Life Surveys for Germany and France (both for total society and selected socio-economic groups) and to assess the goodness of fit to empirical data. The Zenga distribution has not been used to describe the income distribution in these countries yet. The obtained parameters were assessed for fitting to empirical data using two measures—the Wasserstein-Kantorovich and the Wasserstein-Kantorovich standardized measure. The analysis of the results received allows for the conclusion that the Zenga distribution can fit the income distributions both for small as well as large values. It was also shown that the Zenga distribution fits the data well even with small and very small samples. The article uses a new measure to assess the fit of the distribution to empirical data, based on the Wasserstein-Kantorovich measure assessing the distance between the empirical and theoretical cumulative distribution function. The modification consisted in standardizing the Wasserstein-Kantorovich measure by dividing the field between distributors by the rectangle area, where length is maximum income and width is maximum value of the cumulative distribution function. The proposed measure is not sensitive to extreme values, often found in the analysis of income distribution, and can be applied even in very small samples.

Keywords: Income distribution; Zenga distribution; The Wasserstein-Kantorovich distances; Goodness of fit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11135-022-01556-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:qualqt:v:57:y:2023:i:5:d:10.1007_s11135-022-01556-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11135-022-01556-w

Access Statistics for this article

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology is currently edited by Vittorio Capecchi

More articles in Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().