Data and Code for: Measuring Absolute Income Mobility: Lessons from North America and Europe

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Robert Manduca, University of Michigan; Maximilian Hell, Stanford University; Adrian Adermon, Institute for Evaluation of Labor Market and Education Policy; Jo Blanden, University of Surrey; Espen Bratberg, University of Bergen; Anne Gielen, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Hans van Kippersluis, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Lee Keun Bok, University of California-Irvine; Stephen Machin, London School of Economics; Martin Munk, Aarhus University; Martin Nybom, Institute for Evaluation of Labor Market and Education Policy; Yuri Ostrovsky, Statistics Canada; Sumaiya Rahman, Frontier Economics; Outi Sirniö, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
Canada			08/01/2023 04:43:PM
Finland			08/11/2023 07:07:PM
Netherlands			08/11/2023 07:27:PM
Norway			08/11/2023 11:43:PM
Sweden			08/01/2023 04:47:PM
UK			08/11/2023 11:36:PM
US			08/11/2023 07:05:PM
combined_analysis			08/11/2023 11:29:PM
README.pdf	application/pdf	1 MB	08/11/2023 07:44:PM

Project Citation:

Manduca, Robert, Hell, Maximilian, Adermon, Adrian, Blanden, Jo, Bratberg, Espen, Gielen, Anne, … Sirniö, Outi. Data and Code for: Measuring Absolute Income Mobility: Lessons from North America and Europe. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2024. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2024-02-28. https://doi.org/10.3886/E176522V1

Project Description

Summary: We use linked parent-child administrative data for five countries in North America and Europe, and detailed survey data for two more, to investigate methodological challenges in the estimation of absolute income mobility. We show that the commonly used “copula and marginals” approximation methods perform well across countries in our sample, and the greatest challenges to their accuracy stem not from assumptions about relative mobility rates over time but from the use of non-representative marginal income distributions. We also provide a multi-country analysis of sensitivity to specification decisions related to age of income measurement, income concept, family structure, and price index.

Funding Sources: NWO Vidi (452-17-007); Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland (293103); European Research Council Consolidator (ERC-2013-CoG-617965); Academy of Finland Flagship Programme (345547); Harvard Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy; NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Dynamics of Inequality Across the Life-course (724363)

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: Intergenerational Mobility; Absolute mobility

JEL Classification:
      D31 Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
      E24 Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
      J62 Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion

Geographic Coverage: The Netherlands, Canada, Sweden, Norway, United States of America, Finland, The United Kingdom

Time Period(s): 1/1/1940 – 12/31/2020 (The time period covered varies from country to country. The earliest data is from the 1940 birth cohort in the US, and the latest is from the 1990 birth cohort in Finland, whose incomes were measured in 2020.)

Data Type(s): administrative records data; aggregate data; census/enumeration data; survey data

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Published Versions

V1 [2024-02-28]

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