• International Journal of Reliability and Applications
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.65-82
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• 2017

Abstract. Camilo Dagum proposed several variants of a new model for the size distribution of personal income in a series of papers in the 1970s. He traced the genesis of the Dagum distributions in applied economics and points out parallel developments in several branches of the applied statistics literature. The main aim of this paper is to define a bivariate Dagum distribution so that the marginals have Dagum distributions. It is observed that the joint probability density function and the joint cumulative distribution function can be expressed in closed forms. Several properties of this distribution such as marginals, conditional distributions and product moments have been discussed. The maximum likelihood estimates for the unknown parameters of this distribution and their approximate variance-covariance matrix have been obtained. Some simulations have been performed to see the performances of the MLEs. One data analysis has been performed for illustrative purpose.