Two sets of high quality income data are analysed in detail, one set from the UK, one from the USA. It is firstly demonstrated that both a log-normal distribution and a Boltzmann distribution can give very accurate fits to both these data sets. The absence of a power tail in the US data set is...

Statistical models of economic distributions lead to Boltzmann distributions rather than a Pareto power law. This result is supported by two facts: 1. the distributions of income, car sales, marriages or jobs are a matter of chances and luck and not of reason! 2. Data for property, automobile...

The paper starts with a brief review of present understanding of income distributions; especially with regard to recent work in the field of econophysics that draws parallels between income, wealth and energy distributions. Examples of alternative energy distributions found in physical systems...