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Does Income Mobility Equalize Longer-Term Incomes? New Measures Of An Old Concept, Gary S. Fields
Does Income Mobility Equalize Longer-Term Incomes? New Measures Of An Old Concept, Gary S. Fields
Gary S Fields
This paper develops a new class of measures of mobility as an equalizer of longer-term incomes – a concept different from other notions such as mobility as time-independence, positional movement, share movement, income flux, and directional income movement. A number of properties are specified leading to a class of indices, one easily-implementable member of which is applied to data for the United States and France. Using this index, income mobility is found to have equalized longer-term earnings among U.S. men in the 1970s but not in the 1980s or 1990s. In France, though, income mobility was equalizing throughout, and it …
How Demanding Should Equality Of Opportunity Be, And How Much Have We Achieved?, Valentino Dardanoni, Gary S. Fields, John E. Roemer, Maria Laura Sánchez Puerta
How Demanding Should Equality Of Opportunity Be, And How Much Have We Achieved?, Valentino Dardanoni, Gary S. Fields, John E. Roemer, Maria Laura Sánchez Puerta
Gary S Fields
[Excerpt] This chapter proposes tests of various notions of equality of opportunity and applies them to intergenerational income data for the United States and Britain. Agreement is widespread that equality of opportunity holds in a society if the chances that individuals have to succeed depend only on their own efforts and not on extraneous circumstances that may inhibit or expand those chances. What is contentious, however, is what constitutes "effort" and "circumstances." Most people, we think, would say that the social connections of an individual's parents would be included among circumstances: equality of opportunity is incomplete if some individuals get …