Power Laws and Inequalities: The Case of British District House Price Dispersion

Abstract

Descriptive statistics that are easy to generate and interpret are central to policy decision making. The GINI coefficient and the coefficient of variation are used widely when assessing inequality. In many areas of inequality, such as wealth and income holdings, the distribution is skewed. Here, simple power laws could provide useful ‘descriptive’ exponents. The Zipf-Pareto power law and Lavalette’s law are used to reveal a steepening in the distribution of district house prices in Britain that began before the financial crash of 2008. The time profiles indicate the exponents closely mirror those of the GINI coefficient and the coefficient of variation. As such, they are useful tools in the quantification of inequalities.

Keywords

• quintile ratio
• house price in Britain
• Lavalette’s law
• inequality
• coefficient of variation