Exploring Shorrocks Mobility Indices Using European Data

Paul Gregg and Claudia Vittori

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: Starting from the approach proposed by Schluter and Trede (2003) we develop a continuous and alternative measure of mobility which first, allows to identify mobility over different parts of the earnings distribution and second, to distinguish between mobility that tends to reduce or increase the level of permanent inequality. This paper focuses on four European countries, Denmark, Germany, Spain and the UK. In a global perspective, mobility in the short and long-run analysis tends to equalize the level of permanent inequality. Six year changes comparing the average between 1994 and 1995 with the average of 2000 and 2001, suggests that Denmark has the highest mobility mainly almost entirely from higher mobility at the middle and top of the distribution. Germany has the lowest overall mobility. Overall mobility over six years produces only a modest reduction in inequality patterns (5 to 10%) adopting the Gini index and there is no clear correlation between mobility and inequality levels. Exploiting the decomposability of the mobility index developed, we carry out a local analysis by earnings quintiles which draw some general key facts. It emerges that it is the bottom 20 percent of the earnings distribution that makes the largest contribution to the global mobility pattern and that mobility, with the exception of Denmark, does not lead to clear convergence to the mean but at points around 0.7-0.8 and 1.5 to 2 times the mean.

Keywords: Earnings; mobility; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J3 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2008-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2008/wp206.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2008/wp206.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2008/wp206.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:cmpowp:08/206

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().