Income distribution in the European Union versus in the United States

We prove that the refined approach-our extension of the Yakovenko et al. formalism-is universal in the sense that it describes well both household incomes in the European Union and individual incomes in the United States for all income social classes. This formalism, supplemented in this work by the entropy analysis, allowed the study of the impact of the recent world-wide financial crisis on the annual incomes of different income social classes. Hence, we find the most painful impact of the crisis on incomes of all income social classes. Furthermore, we indicate the existence of a possible market crisis precursor.