Comparing Income Mobility in Germany and the United States Using Generalized Entropy Mobility Measures

Esfandiar Maasoumi; Mark Trede

doi:10.1162/00346530152480199

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Comparing Income Mobility in Germany and the United States Using Generalized Entropy Mobility Measures

Esfandiar Maasoumi¹; Mark Trede²

¹ Southern Methodist University · ² University of Cologne

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2001

Based on a derivation of the asymptotic sampling distribution of the generalized entropy mobility measures, this paper provides a statistically rigorous analysis of income mobility in Germany and the United States using the panel data set PSID-SOEP equivalent data file. Several alternative measures of income aggregation, inequality measures, and groupings are considered to establish robustness. We find that, to a high degree of statistical confidence, post-government income mobility is much higher in Germany. Possible reasons for these findings are revealed through disaggregation of the samples by population subgroups.

DOI: 10.1162/00346530152480199
Volume: 83 (3)
Pages: 551-559
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
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