Exponential and power-law probability distributions of wealth and income in the United Kingdom and the United States

Abstract

We present the data on wealth and income distributions in the United Kingdom, as well as on the income distributions in the individual states of the USA. In all of these data, we find that the great majority of population is described by an exponential distribution, whereas the high-end tail follows a power law. The distributions are characterized by a dimensional scale analogous to temperature. The values of temperature are determined for the UK and the USA, as well as for the individual states of the USA.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, elsart.cls. Submitted to Physica A, proceedings of NATO workshop Applications of Physics in Economic Modeling, Prague, February 2001. V.2: minor stylistic expansio