Spatial distribution of large income earners: an empirical study on the formation of exclusive residential districts

The aim of this paper is to investigate the statistical properties of the spatial distribution for each of the towns in Japan, of the number of large income earners living in them and their total income. Using a Japanese database of high-income taxpayers for two consecutive years, 1997 and 1998, we found that the complementary cumulative distribution functions of the number of large income earners and the total income of all of them for each of the towns is well described by a power-law distribution with an exponent close to 2. Our results show that large income earners tend to gravitate to a small number of towns, leading to the evolution of so-called high-class residential streets and neighborhoods.