We use data on wealth of the richest persons taken from the "rich lists"provided by business magazines like Forbes to verify if upper tails of wealthdistributions follow, as often claimed, a power-law behaviour. The data setsused cover the world's richest persons over 1996-2012, the richest Americansover 1988-2012, the richest Chinese over 2006-2012 and the richest Russiansover 2004-2011. Using a recently introduced comprehensive empirical methodologyfor detecting power laws, which allows for testing goodness of fit as well asfor comparing the power-law model with rival distributions, we find that apower-law model is consistent with data only in 35% of the analysed data sets.Moreover, even if wealth data are consistent with the power-law model, usuallythey are also consistent with some rivals like the log-normal or stretchedexponential distributions.
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