Abstract: Abstract : The paper deals with the dynamics of the individual economic well-being, as the result of accumulation and redistribution of the resources between the members of a household. The personal economic well-being is measured by the net equivalent income of the household to which he/she belongs, that is the household income adjusted for the different household composition: besides this indicator we introduce also a different measure, based on household equivalent consumption. The literature about the income mobility hosts several definitions and classifications: they include an absolute measure referring to changes in the income level in a time interval and a relative measure, which is function of the changes in the income ranking. However, the references on income mobility are not very plentiful, at least in comparison with the literature n another odimension of the income distribution, that is inequality. This may be due also to the only recent wide availability of longitudinal information on income: apart from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that began collecting data on a sample of U.S. individuals and households in 1968, surveys of this kind started in some European countries only in the mid 80’s and they reached a spread on a large scale through the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) project that began in 1994. Studies n the income distribution with panel data often relate mobility and inequality: the oindividual movements within the distribution between two time periods generate a certain degree of upward or downward mobility that can modify the concentration in the income distribution at the end of the period. In this work, the dynamics of income in real terms is analysed both in a descriptive and in a modelling framework. From a descriptive point of view, transition matrices are derived and the most widely known mobility indicators are computed in order to quantify the observed changes in income. As classification variables, we use fixed personal and household covariates as well as covariates expressing changes in labour market position and household composition; this allows us to distinguish between employment and demographic events when studying the process that leads to a change in income. The modelling approach estimates multivariate regression models to study the joint relationship between the explanatory variables and the dependent variable, that is the change in income. The 4-wave panel subsample of the Survey of Household Income and Wealth, conducted by the Bank of Italy (1993-2000) is the experimental database. The subsample includes about 1,600 households and 4,400 individuals, representative of the whole population of individuals living in households in Italy.
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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