Capital and Labor Income Mobility

Marco Ranaldi, Joël Bühler, Roberto Iacono and Mathias Bühler

No 12651, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This article investigates whether capital or labor income drives overall relative income mobility. To this aim, we use Norwegian income registers covering 293,875 individuals over 26 years. A new framework decomposes total income mobility into capital and labor components across the life cycle. Results show: (1) traditional capital and labor mobility measures yield no clear factor ordering; (2) upward mobility is driven by labor income and joint upward movements; and (3) downward mobility is driven by capital income and joint declines. Findings are robust to large jumps, income definition and cohort selection.

Keywords: Income mobility decomposition; capital–labor income dynamics; Intra-generational relative mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D33 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12651.pdf (application/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:ces:ceswps:_12651

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().