We analyze the data on personal income distribution from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. We compare fits of the data to the exponential, log-normal, and gamma distributions. The exponential function gives a good (albeit not perfect) description of 98% of the population in the lower part of...

We present the data on wealth and income distributions in the United Kingdom, as well as on the income distributions in the individual states of the USA. In all of these data, we find that the great majority of population is described by an exponential distribution, whereas the high-end tail...

We compare the probability distribution of returns for the three major stock-market indexes (Nasdaq, S&P500, and Dow-Jones) with an analytical formula recently derived by Drăgulescu and Yakovenko for the Heston model with stochastic variance. For the period of 1982–1999, we find a very good...

We present an empirical study of the subordination hypothesis for a stochastic time series of a stock price. The fluctuating rate of trading is identified with the stochastic variance of the stock price, as in the continuous-time random walk (CTRW) framework. The probability distribution of the...

We study the global probability distribution of energy consumption per capita around the world using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) for 1980-2010. We find that the Lorenz curves have moved up during this time period, and the Gini coefficient G has decreased from 0.66...

Using tax and census data, we demonstrate that the distribution of individual income in the USA is exponential. Our calculated Lorenz curve without fitting parameters and Gini coefficient 1/2 agree well with the data. From the individual income distribution, we derive the distribution function...

We study the Heston model, where the stock price dynamics is governed by a geometrical (multiplicative) Brownian motion with stochastic variance. We solve the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation exactly and, after integrating out the variance, find an analytic formula for the time-dependent...

This Colloquium reviews statistical models for money, wealth, and income distributions developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. By analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy in physics, it is shown that the probability distribution of money is exponential for...

Personal income distribution in the USA has a well-defined two-class structure. The majority of population (97-99%) belongs to the lower class characterized by the exponential Boltzmann-Gibbs ("thermal") distribution, whereas the upper class (1-3% of population) has a Pareto power-law...

In this short paper, we overview and extend the results of our papers cond-mat/0001432, cond-mat/0008305, and cond-mat/0103544, where we use an analogy with statistical physics to describe probability distributions of money, income, and wealth in society. By making a detailed quantitative...