Abstract
Power laws are pervasive in economics and the social sciences, particularly in the upper tails of distributions such as wealth, income, firm size, and city populations. Their scale-free property makes them a useful framework for understanding phenomena spanning several orders of magnitude. This chapter reviews their mathematical and often counterintuitive statistical properties, empirical evidence, estimation challenges, and stochastic generating processes, with particular emphasis on firm size, wealth, income, concentration, and inequality.
Citation
Jan Schulz & Jan David Weber (2025): Power Laws in Socio-Economics. Submitted.