Tag Archives: incomes

Modeling Incomes and Inequalities

Last week, in our Inequality course, we’ve been looking at data. We started with some simulated data, only a few of them

> library("ineq")
> load(url("http://freakonometrics.free.fr/income_5.RData"))
> (income=sort(income))
[1]  19233  23707  53297  61667 218662

How could we say that there is inequality in this sample? If we look at the wealth owned by the poorest, the poorest person (1 out of 5) owns 5% of the wealth; the bottom two (2 out of 5) own 11%, etc

> income[1]/sum(income)
[1] 0.05107471
> sum(income[1:2])/sum(income)
[1] 0.1140305
> sum(income[1:3])/sum(income)
[1] 0.2555648
> sum(income[1:4])/sum(income)
[1] 0.4193262

If we plot those values, we get Lorenz curve

> plot(Lc(income))
> points(c(0:5)/5,c(0,cumsum(income)/sum(income)),pch=19,col="blue")

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