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The distribution of wealth displays remarkable regularities in its functional form over space and time, particularly in the upper tail that is distributed according to a power law. The high degree of complexity underlying the distribution of wealth in an economy does not allow us to explain the observed distribution by tracing the destinies of all involved agents. Instead, we take recourse to the maximum entropy formalism that originated in statistical mechanics and information theory—and was later generalized into a principle of probabilistic inference—in order to determine and economically interpret the aggregate constraints that are responsible for the observed wealth distribution. From a methodological point of view, our statistical equilibrium reasoning breaks with the prevalent conviction that macroeconomic outcomes must be explained and rooted in microeconomic behavior and, instead, argues that microeconomic …