Is the Distribution of Income Compatible with a Stable Distribution?

John Dagsvik and Bjørn H. Vatne ()
Additional contact information
Bjørn H. Vatne: Statistics Norway, https://www.ssb.no/en/forskning/ansatte

Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department

Abstract: Mandelbrot (1961) proposed to apply the class of Pareto-Levy distributions - which belong to the Stable distributions - as a framework for modelling income distributions. He also presented theoretic arguments in favor of the Pareto-Levy distributions. In this paper we provide additional theoretical justification for this class of distributions. We also use micro data on individual market income to estimate the parameters of a Pareto-Levy distribution. Several estimation methods have been applied. The estimated Pareto-Levy distribution appears to fit the data well.

Keywords: Stable distributions; Pareto-Levy distributions; Income distributions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 D31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp246.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ssb:dispap:246

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department P.O.Box 8131 Dep, N-0033 Oslo, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by L Maasø ().