The study of socioeconomic inequality is of prime economic and social importance, and the key quantitative gauges of socioeconomic inequality are Lorenz curves and inequality indices — the most notable of the latter being the popular Gini index. In this series of papers we present a...

The study of socioeconomic inequality is of prime economic and social importance, and the key quantitative gauges of socioeconomic inequality are Lorenz curves and inequality indices—the most notable of the latter being the popular Gini index. In this series of papers we present a...

We propose an approach to explain fluctuations in time intervals of financial markets data from the view-point of the Gini index. We show the explicit form of the Gini index for a Weibull distribution: A good candidate to describe the first passage time of foreign exchange rate. The analytical...

Possible distributions are discussed for intertrade durations and first-passage processes in financial markets. The view-point of renewal theory is assumed. In order to represent market data with relatively long durations, two types of distributions are used, namely a distribution derived from...

Punctuated Equilibrium (PE) states that after long periods of evolutionary quiescence, species evolution can take place in short time intervals, where sudden differentiation makes new species emerge and some species extinct. In this paper, we introduce and study the effect of punctuated...

In a recent paper in this journal [Q. Guo, L. Gao, Distribution of individual incomes in China between 1992 and 2009, Physica A 391 (2012) 5139–5145], a new family of distributions for modeling individual incomes in China was proposed. This family is the so-called Modified Gaussian (MG)...

This paper explores an elemental connection between call options–the most commonly tradable financial derivatives, implied volatility term structures–critical “market information” emanating from call-option prices, and the Pietra index–a quantitative economic measure of societal...

There are various ways of quantifying the statistical heterogeneity of a given probability law: Statistics uses variance — which measures the law’s dispersion around its mean; Physics and Information Theory use entropy — which measures the law’s randomness; Economics uses the Gini index...

From the Old Testament to the Communist Manifesto, and from the French Revolution to the Occupy Wall Street protests, social inequality has always been at the focal point of public debate, as well as a major driver of political change. Although being of prime interest since Biblical times, the...