Do we value mobility?
Is there a trade-off between people's preference for income equality and income mobility? Testing for the existence of such a trade-off is difficult because mobility is a multifaceted concept. We analyse results from a questionnaire experiment based on simple precise concepts of income inequality and income mobility. We fnd no direct trade-off in preference between mobility and equality, but an indirect trade-off, applying when more income mobility can only be obtained at the expense of some income inequality. Mobility preference - but not equality preference - appears to be driven by personal experience of mobility.
An Experimental Analysis of Social Mobility Comparisons
Social mobility is an issue at the crossroad of various disciplines: sociology, statistics, political science and economics. We review alternative approaches to the analysis of intergenerational income mobility, and conduct a questionnaire aimed to reveal students' opinions on some basic principles developed in the literature. The questionnaire includes questions focussed on: (a) the difference between structural and exchange mobility; (b) the decomposition of mobility tables into parameters linked to structural mobility and parameters linked to exchange mobility; (c) the effects of transformations of the status variables (incomes) on mobility comparisons. These issues have been formalized …
Measuring and Evaluating Intergenerational Mobility: Evidence from Students’ Questionnaires
Three fundamental ideas in the study of intergenerational mobility are those of structural mobility, origin independence and rank reversal. We review the theoretical literature focused on the three ideas and present evidence from a questionnaire designed to test students’ views regarding the different notions. The questionnaire is conducted under both a “measurement” and an “evaluation” frame; it uses questions involving both verbal statements of the principles tested and pairwise comparisons of simple hypothetical mobility situations; for the latter exercise, the questionnaire introduces a new intuitive display based on mobility trees. The evidence provides various results: most notably, o…