Income Distribution in the European Union Versus in the United States

Abstract: 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 the individual incomes in the United States for social classes of any income. This formalism allowed the study of the impact of the recent world-wide financial crisis on the annual incomes of different social classes. Hence, we indicate the existence of a possible precursor of a market crisis. Besides, we find the most painful impact of the crisis on incomes of all social classes.