Is the wealth of the world’s billionaires Paretian?

This paper investigates the issue of whether or not the top world wealth distribution is Paretian in nature. To this end, Forbes’ data on the net worth of the world’s billionaires for each of the ten years from 2000 to 2009 is used. The results of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS), Anderson–Darling (AD) and chi-squared tests for Pareto power law conducted do not reveal any evidence of Paretian behavior at the conventional 5% level of significance.