Who gets ahead? Cross-country evidence on intragenerational income mobility

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Speaker:
Javier Terrero Dávila, Economist, OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs

We use administrative records from Austria, Belgium, Estonia and Spain to examine disposable income dynamics among working-age individuals over five years. Aggregate mobility indices often mask substantial variation across the income distribution. To address this, we compute positional and absolute mobility metrics at the percentile level, enabling a detailed analysis of mobility patterns across countries and socio-demographic groups. Our findings reveal pronounced cross-country differences in income growth for individuals starting at the bottom of the distribution, while outcomes at the top are more homogeneous. Large disparities in proportional income growth translate into much smaller gaps in absolute income changes, and patterns of absolute and positional mobility are only imperfectly associated, reflecting differences in the shapes of income distributions. Estonia exhibits the greatest relative and absolute intragenerational mobility. Across socio-demographic groups, young people experience greater income mobility than older age groups; women experience lower income progression than men in the lower half of the distribution, but the gap narrows in the upper half; individuals with lower educational attainment and immigrants consistently show weaker mobility outcomes across the entire income distribution.

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Host or Publisher LSE International Inequalities Institute