期刊名称：IFS Working Papers / Institute for Fiscal Studies London
电子版ISSN：1742-0415
出版年度：2007
卷号：1
出版社：Institute for Fiscal Studies London
摘要：Significant departures from log normality are observed in income data, in violation of Gibrat's law. We identify a new empirical regularity, which is that the distribution of consumption expenditures across households is, within cohorts, closer to log normal than the distribution of income. We explain these empirical results by showing that the logic of Gibrat's law applies not to total income, but to permanent income and to maginal utility. These findings have important implications for welfare and inequality measurement, aggregation, and econometric model analysis.
