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RESEARCH PRODUCT

What's So Speciall About Euclidean Distance? A Characterization Result with Applications to Mobility and Spatial Voting

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In this paper we investigate the problem of measuring social mobility when the social status of individuals is given by their rank. In order to sensibly rep- resent the rank mobility of subgroups within a given society, we address the problem in terms of partial permutation matrices which include standard (“global”) matrices as a special case. We first provide a characterization of a partial ordering on partial matrices which, in the standard case of global matrices, coincides with the well-known “concordance” ordering. We then provide a characterization of an index of rank mo- bility based on partial matrices and show that, in the standard case of comparing two global matrices, it is equivalent to Spearman’s ρ index.