Who Gets Ahead? Cross-country Evidence on Intragenerational Income Mobility from Administrative Records

Sebastian Koenigs () and Javier Terrero-Davila
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Sebastian Koenigs: OECD
Javier Terrero-Davila: OECD
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Sebastian Königs

No 698, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: Income mobility is often invoked as a counterweight to slow income growth and high inequality, yet conclusions on who benefits from mobility depend on the part of the income distribution examined and the metric used. Drawing on harmonised administrative records from Austria, Belgium, Estonia and Spain, we combine relative and absolute mobility metrics to study disposable income dynamics for working-age individuals along the distribution between 2017 and 2022. Those at the bottom experience markedly different income growth across countries, while those at the top experience homogeneous declines. Rank persistence varies substantially across countries, from 0.64 in Estonia to 0.79 in Spain, but top incomes are highly persistent everywhere, largely insulated from country-specific mobility dynamics. Mobility gaps by age, gender, education and place of residence also change in sign and magnitude depending on people’s starting point in the distribution. We show that different metrics can give conflicting assessments of where mobility is more favourable for those at the bottom, and that these differences are largely explained by countries' levels of inequality and aggregate income growth: more unequal or higher-growth countries need more progressive income growth to deliver comparable positional mobility and narrowing of absolute income gaps.

Keywords: Income mobility; income inequality; income growth; administrative records (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 H24 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: pages
Date: 2026-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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