Estimating The Distribution of Net Worth by Age Using Johnson’s Bivariate SU Distribution

This study proposes the use of Johnson’s (1949) multivariate SU distribution for estimating the joint distribution among economic well-being variables. The SU distribution exhibits extremely high flexibility, enabling it to effectively capture the extreme skewness and kurtosis commonly seen in wealth and income variables. As this distribution imposes no constraints on variable ranges, it is well-suited for estimating the distributions of net worth or disposable income, which often include non-positive values. As an illustrative example, we employ the bivariate SU model to estimate the joint distribution of net worth and age using the US survey data.