出版社：Suntory Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines
摘要：This paper is about the distributional dynamics of net household in-come in the US, Germany, and the UK. According to common wisdom, theUS and European countries are often taken to be worlds apart. This viewjuxtaposes the US as a very mobile society with an immobile Europe. Inparticular, Germany is often caricatured as a country in stasis. As it turnsout, this view is mistaken. Despite di.erent labour market institutionsand tax-beneˉt systems standard mobility measures attribute a greatermobility to Germany than to the US. We also show that this result ismainly driven by the substantially greater mobility of the German poor.We highlight the problems arising from standard approaches based onmobility indices and transition matrices, which group persons into incomeclasses of arbitrary size, and propose the use of stochastic kernels.Finally, in order to determine whether income changes are transitoryor permanent, a law of motion for income is estimated
