A Guide to the Dagum Distributions

In a series of papers in the 1970s, Camilo Dagum proposed several variants ofa new model for the size distribution of personal income. This Chapter traces thegenesis of the Dagum distributions in applied economics and points out paralleldevelopments in several branches of the applied statistics literature. It also providesinterrelations with other statistical distributions as well as aspects that are of specialinterest in the income distribution eld, including Lorenz curves and the Lorenz orderand inequality measures. The Chapter ends with a survey of empirical applicationsof the Dagum distributions, many published in Romance language periodicals.