Income risk, income mobility and welfare

This paper develops a framework for the quantitative analysis of individual income dynamics, mobility and welfare. Individual income is assumed to follow a stochastic process with two (unobserved) components, an i.i.d. component representing measurement error or transitory income shocks and an AR(1)...

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Autores:
Krebs, Tom
Krishna, Pravin
Maloney, William Francis
Tipo de recurso:
Work document
Fecha de publicación:
2013
Institución:
Universidad de los Andes
Repositorio:
Séneca: repositorio Uniandes
Idioma:
eng
OAI Identifier:
oai:repositorio.uniandes.edu.co:1992/8378
Acceso en línea:
http://hdl.handle.net/1992/8378
Palabra clave:
Income mobility
Labor market risk
Social welfare
Distribución del ingreso
Movilidad social
Bienestar social
J6, E2, D31, I32
Rights
openAccess
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Description
Summary:This paper develops a framework for the quantitative analysis of individual income dynamics, mobility and welfare. Individual income is assumed to follow a stochastic process with two (unobserved) components, an i.i.d. component representing measurement error or transitory income shocks and an AR(1) component representing persistent changes in income. We use a tractable consumption-saving model with labor income risk and incomplete markets to relate income dynamics to consumption and welfare, and derive analytical expressions for income mobility and welfare as a function of the various parameters of the underlying income process. The empirical application of our framework using data on individual incomes from Mexico provides striking results. Much of measured income mobility is driven by measurement error or transitory income shocks and therefore (almost) welfare-neutral. A smaller part of measured income mobility is due to either welfare-reducing income risk or welfare-enhancing catching-up of low-income individuals with high-income individuals, both of which have economically significant effects on social welfare. Decomposing mobility into its fundamental components is thus seen to be crucial from the standpoint of welfare evaluation.