Abstract
We study unit-level expenditure on consumption across multiple countries
and multiple years, in order to extract invariant features of
consumption distribution. We show that the bulk of it is lognormally
distributed, followed by a power law tail at the limit. The
distributions coincide with each other under normalization by mean
expenditure and log scaling even though the data is sampled across
multiple dimension including, e.g. time, social structure and locations.
This phenomenon indicates that the dispersions in consumption
expenditure across various social and economic groups are significantly
similar subject to suitable scaling and normalization. Further, the
results provide a measurement of the core distributional features. Other
descriptive factors including those of sociological, demographic and
political nature, add further layers of variation on the this core
distribution. We present a stochastic multiplicative model to
quantitatively characterize the invariance and the distributional
features.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 469–490 |
Journal | Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2018 |
MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Keywords
- Consumption distribution
- Inequality
- Invariance
- Lognormal distribution
- Power law