  We use data on wealth of the richest persons taken from the "rich lists"
provided by business magazines like Forbes to verify if upper tails of wealth
distributions follow, as often claimed, a power-law behaviour. The data sets
used cover the world's richest persons over 1996-2012, the richest Americans
over 1988-2012, the richest Chinese over 2006-2012 and the richest Russians
over 2004-2011. Using a recently introduced comprehensive empirical methodology
for detecting power laws, which allows for testing goodness of fit as well as
for comparing the power-law model with rival distributions, we find that a
power-law model is consistent with data only in 35% of the analysed data sets.
Moreover, even if wealth data are consistent with the power-law model, usually
they are also consistent with some rivals like the log-normal or stretched
exponential distributions.
