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On moment indeterminacy of the Benini income distribution

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Abstract

The Benini distribution is a lognormal-like distribution generalizing the Pareto distribution. Like the Pareto and the lognormal distributions it was originally proposed for modeling economic size distributions, notably the size distribution of personal income. This paper explores a probabilistic property of the Benini distribution, showing that it is not determined by the sequence of its moments although all the moments are finite. It also provides explicit examples of distributions possessing the same set of moments. Related distributions are briefly explored.

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  1. Faculty of Business and Economics, Universität Basel, Peter Merian-Weg 6, 4002 , Basel, Switzerland

    Christian Kleiber

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  1. Christian Kleiber
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Correspondence to Christian Kleiber.

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Kleiber, C. On moment indeterminacy of the Benini income distribution. Stat Papers 54, 1121–1130 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00362-013-0535-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00362-013-0535-9

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