The stereotype of rich Jews versus poor Gentiles does not apply to fin-de-siècle Hungary. Although the average income of Jews was higher than that of Gentiles, the distribution of income among Jews was extremely unequal, far more so than among Christians. Jews were over-represented at the poor...

This paper proposes the κ-generalized distribution as a model for describing the distribution and dispersion of income within a population. Formulas for the shape, moments and standard tools for inequality measurement–such as the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient–are given. A method for...

This paper discusses the empirical validity of Goodwin’s (1967) macroeconomic model of growth with cycles by assuming that the individual income distribution of the Brazilian society is described by the Gompertz–Pareto distribution (GPD). This is formed by the combination of the Gompertz...

We have numerically simulated the ideal-gas models of trading markets, where each agent is identified with a gas molecule and each trading as an elastic or money-conserving two-body collision. Unlike in the ideal gas, we introduce (quenched) saving propensity of the agents, distributed widely...

The econophysics “two-class” theory of Yakovenko and his co-authors shows that the distribution of labor incomes is roughly exponential. This paper extends this result to US subgroups categorized by gender and race. It is well known that Males have higher average incomes than Females, and...

Based on the assumption that certain economies achieve quasi-equilibrium, an appropriate economic statistical thermodynamics is formulated in which entropy emerges naturally. Under the assumption that the small group of high income agents, whose income distribution satisfies Pareto's law, does...

Herein, we applied statistical physics to study incomes of three (low-, medium- and high-income) society classes instead of the two (low- and medium-income) classes studied so far. In the frame of the threshold nonlinear Langevin dynamics and its threshold Fokker–Planck counterpart, we derived...

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)...

We analyze the income distribution of employees for 9 consecutive years (2001–2009) using a complete social security database for an economically important district of Romania. The database contains detailed information on more than half million taxpayers, including their monthly salaries from...

A stochastic model for the generation of observed income distributions is used to provide an explanation for the Pareto law of incomes. Analysis of the model also yields a prediction of Paretian (power law) behaviour in the lower tail of the distribution and this is shown to occur in a number of...