The measurement of income mobility : an introduction to the literature, February, 1996

Evaluation of distributions of income on the basis of equality is one of the most extensively studied topics in the general field of welfare economics. There is thus an enormous body of work devoted exclusively to the problem of the measurement of welfare and income inequality experienced by a given society.2 However, the majority of these studies are conducted in static terms, where the so-called “snapshots” of the income distributions are taken as the primitives of the analysis. Nevertheless, static evaluations of income distributions can provide only an incomplete picture, for, in most instances, the social welfare would certainly depend on the dynamics of income distribution as well.3 This basic insight, along with the increased availability of longitudinal data sets, has led to a massive and rapidly expanding literature on the measurement of income mobility. This chapter surveys the highlights of this literature.

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