Power laws in socio-economics

Jan Schulz and Jan David Weber

No 203, BERG Working Paper Series from Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group

Abstract: Power laws are pervasive in economics and social sciences, particularly in the upper tails of distributions such as wealth, income, firm size, and city populations. Their scale-free property makes them a universal framework to understand phenomena spanning several orders of magnitude. This chapter explores their mathematical and often counterintuitive statistical properties, empirical evidence, and the stochastic processes that generate them. Emphasis is placed on their universal applicability, particularly to firm size, wealth, and income distributions and their potential to address the pressing issues of our time.

Keywords: Distribution; Growth Processes; Extreme Values; Concentration; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:bamber:314423

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