5 research outputs found
Income Distribution Dependence of Poverty Measure: A Theoretical Analysis
With a new deprivation (or poverty) function, in this paper, we theoretically
study the changes in poverty with respect to the `global' mean and variance of
the income distribution using Indian survey data. We show that when the income
obeys a log-normal distribution, a rising mean income generally indicates a
reduction in poverty while an increase in the variance of the income
distribution increases poverty. This altruistic view for a developing economy,
however, is not tenable anymore once the poverty index is found to follow a
pareto distribution. Here although a rising mean income indicates a reduction
in poverty, due to the presence of an inflexion point in the poverty function,
there is a critical value of the variance below which poverty decreases with
increasing variance while beyond this value, poverty undergoes a steep increase
followed by a decrease with respect to higher variance. Following these
results, we make quantitative predictions to correlate a developing with a
developed economy.Comment: 13 pages in single spaced latex, 4 figures, submitted to
'Econometrica
Emerging properties of financial time series in the “Game of Life”
We explore the spatial complexity of Conway’s “Game of Life,” a prototypical cellular automaton by means of a geometrical procedure generating a two-dimensional random walk from a bidimensional lattice with periodical boundaries. The one-dimensional projection of this process is analyzed and it turns out that some of its statistical properties resemble the so-called stylized facts observed in financial time series. The scope and meaning of this result are discussed from the viewpoint of complex systems. In particular, we stress how the supposed peculiarities of financial time series are, often, overrated in their importance