Statistical distribution of wages and wealth

Question

How are wages distributed globally? Wages do not follow a normal distribution, do they? Is wealth distributed in the same way or differently?

Since wages cannot be negative, I would rather say that they follow a log-normal, truncated at the minimum (nominal) wages, or exponential maybe. I have no sources though. Also, if any answer does what you want, please consider ticking it as correct. A reputation of 1 is enough to do it. I remind you this because newcomers often forget to do so. See What should I do when someone answers my question? That being said, welcome on EC. — keepAlive, Jan 05 '19 at 11:38
Related: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/13097/are-there-data-for-the-evolution-of-global-economic-inequality — Henry, Jan 05 '19 at 23:13

keepAlive · Answer 1 · 2019-01-06T18:56:04.977

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Globally, there is Lakner and Milanovik (2015)'s elephant graph:

Hellebrandt and Mauro (2015)

Thus, the two previous distributions look like bimodal log-normal distributions.

or CDFs, as in MacAskill's book Doing Good Better

Did not find something strictly related to wages. For most of people, income may be a good proxy of wages.

edited Jan 06 '19 at 18:56

answered Jan 05 '19 at 12:05

keepAlive

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I think it's fair to equate (gross) income to wages for the vast majority of the world population – E. Sommer Jan 05 '19 at 17:28
Any question @ragingacademic ? – keepAlive Oct 17 '19 at 11:33

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 05 '19 at 17:13

Both distributions are often modelled log-normal, with a substantial number of zeros. A pareto distribution is also sometimes used (Piketty & Saez (2012), p.32) for modelling the distribution of top incomes. Wealth distributions are also in general far more skewed than wage (or income) distributions.

Statistical distribution of wages and wealth

2 Answers2