U.S. Income Inequality and Income Mobility in the 1980s and 1990s
39 Pages Posted: 15 May 2008
Date Written: May 1, 2008
Abstract
Income inequality has been increasing in the United States over the past 25 years. Many argue that rising inequality is not a serious issue because income or social mobility reduces inequality and increases well-being. These observers point to studies showing considerable upward mobility. This study examines income mobility and its relation to income inequality. The results show that while there is considerable income mobility, it is generally not far - rags to riches success stories are fairly rare. Furthermore, income mobility has a disequalizing effect on annual income inequality, but has a small equalizing effect on inequality of longer-term incomes.
Keywords: income inequality, income mobility, income distribution
JEL Classification: D31, I38, J10
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Re-Assessing the Revisionists
By David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, ...
-
Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Re-Assessing the Revisionists
By David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, ...
-
Skill Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality: Some Problems and Puzzles
By David Card and John E. Dinardo
-
The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market
By David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, ...
-
Rising Wage Inequality: The Role of Composition and Prices
By David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, ...
-
Rising Wage Inequality: The Role of Composition and Prices
By David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, ...
-
Changes in the Labor Supply Behavior of Married Women: 1980-2000
By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn
-
Revisiting the German Wage Structure
By Christian Dustmann, Johannes Ludsteck, ...
-
Quantile Regression Under Misspecification, with an Application to the U.S. Wage Structure
By Joshua D. Angrist, Victor Chernozhukov, ...