Local versus global assessment of mobility

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Schluter, C; Trede, M
• 署名单位: University of Southampton; University of Munster
• 刊物名称: INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0020-6598
• DOI: 10.1111/1468-2354.t01-1-00111
• 发表日期: 2003
• 页码: 1313-1335
• 关键词: UNITED-STATES; INEQUALITY; Germany; indexes

摘要

Mobility indices are popular tools designed to quantify the extent of income changes by aggregating local distributional change into a global scalar according to some rule. For some mobility measures, this aggregation rule is only implicit in their standard definition. We derive an insightful approximation to the (statistical) aggregation rule for the important class of mobility indices introduced by Shorrocks (Journal of Economic Theory 19 (1978), 376-93) and further generalized by Maasoumi and Zandvakili (Economic Letters 22 (1986), 97-102), which enables us to characterize their normative properties. We also develop methods for estimation and inference. A substantive empirical contribution emerges from the comparison of mobility between the United States and Germany. Our methods reveal why income mobility is higher in Germany than in the United States: Higher German mobility in the bottom of the distribution is combined with an implicitly higher weighting by the mobility index at the bottom.