A Statistical Breakdown of American and European Billionaires

Author

Kent Grass-Valdivia, Elena Chen, Junior, Jeffrey Lim, Amelia Neumann, Sam Goldberg

Published

May 5, 2023

Introduction:

  • Billionaires dataset from CORGIS

  • Created by Peterson Institute for International Economics from Forbes data to show how the increase in extreme wealth is increasing rapidly, even though global income growth is slow.

  • Research question: How do billionaires in the year 2014 between North America and Europe differ in the sources of their wealth, industries they work in, and worth in billions?

Introduce the data

  • Variables:

    • rows = billionaires

    • columns = name of billionaire, rank, company sector, country, region, wealth worth, industry, if the wealth was inherited

  • Cleanup:

    • removed boolean variables, and ones that were not relevant to overall trends (company names)

Highlights from EDA

`geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'

# A tibble: 2 × 2
  location.region mean_weath
  <fct>                <dbl>
1 Europe                4.16
2 North America         4.50

Does the industry differ between North America and Europe?

\[ H_0: p_A - p_E = 0 \] \[ H_A: p_A - p_E \neq 0 \]

p-value : 0.202

Does source of wealth differ between North America and Europe?

\[H_0: p_A-p_E = 0 \]

\[ H_A:p_A-p_E \neq 0 \]

p-value : 0.018

Conclusions + future work

  • Compared American and European billionaires

    • Industries billionaires work in, specifically media
    • Sources of wealth (inherited or not inherited)

  • Important for understanding wealth inequality

  • Could compare to developing regions