Application of Zenga’s distribution to a panel survey on household incomes of European Member States

In this paper Zenga’s distribution is applied to 114 household incomes distributions from a panel survey conducted by Eurostat. Previous works showed the good behaviour of the model to describe income distributions and analyzed the possibility to impose restrictions on the parametric space so that the fitted models comply with some characteristics of interest of the samples. This work is the first application of the model on a wide number of distributions, showing that it can be used to describe incomes distributions of several countries. Maximum likelihood method on grouped data and methods based on the minimization of three different goodness of fit indexes are used to estimate parameters. The restriction that imposes the equivalence between the sample mean and the expected value of the fitted model is also considered. It results that the restrictionshould be used and the changes in fitting are analyzed in order to suggestwhich estimation method use jointly to the restriction.