Mobility as distributional difference

Abstract

We propose a new class of mobility measures which we call “measures of distributional difference.” Members of this new class measure mobility as integrated weighted distributional difference. We demonstrate that many leading measures of mobility proposed in the literature are members of this class. Our approach therefore permits a considerable unification of a diverse literature. Moreover, our tools enable us to make explicit the implicit weighting properties of leading members of this class whose original forms do not lend themselves to such an analysis. This leads us to question the attractiveness of some popular mobility indices.income mobility measures, distributional difference.