2007/09/30 by Arnab Chatterjee, Bikas K. Chakrabarti
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #q-fin.GN #cond-mat.stat-mech #nlin.AO #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjb/e2007-00343-8
published as The European Physical Journal B 60 (2007) 135-149 · 15 pages, 20 eps figures, EPJ class; To be published as "Colloquium" in Eur Phys J B
arxiv created 2007/11/16 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
Increasingly, a huge amount of statistics have been gathered which clearly indicates that income and wealth distributions in various countries or societies follow a robust pattern, close to the Gibbs distribution of energy in an ideal gas in equilibrium. However, it also deviates in the low income and more significantly for the high income ranges. Application of physics models provides illuminating ideas and understanding, complementing the observations.