Inductive analysis from empirical income distributions

According to Lange (1968) the first econometric study has been Pareto’s analysis of the personal income distribution. It appeared first in the Giornale degli Economisti of January 1895. Over the last twenty five years the personal income distribution has also been one of the topics of interest of Cramer, see Cramer (1969,1976,1978) and Ransom and Cramer (1983). Most authors deal with the problem from a normative point of view. They compare the given distribution with some preconceived idea of how the distribution should look like. Cramer is more at home among positivists who aim at a concise description of actual distributions.