IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/diw/diwwpp/dp2068.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Broken Elevator: Declining Absolute Mobility of Living Standards in Germany

Author

Listed:
  • Timm Bönke
  • Astrid Harnack-Eber
  • Holger Lüthen

Abstract

This study provides the first absolute income mobility estimates for postwar Germany. Using various micro data sources, we uncover a steep decline in absolute mobility rates from 81 percent to 59 percent for children’s birth cohorts 1962 through 1988. This trend is robust across different ages, family sizes, measurement methods, copulas, and data sources. Across the parental income distribution, we find that children from middle class families experienced the largest percentage point drop in absolute income mobility (-31pp). Our counterfactual analysis shows that lower economic growth rates and higher income inequality contributed similarly to these trends.

Suggested Citation

  • Timm Bönke & Astrid Harnack-Eber & Holger Lüthen, 2024. "The Broken Elevator: Declining Absolute Mobility of Living Standards in Germany," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 2068, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp2068
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.890061.de/dp2068.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Timm Bönke & Giacomo Corneo & Holger Lüthen, 2015. "Lifetime Earnings Inequality in Germany," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 33(1), pages 171-208.
    2. Markus M. Grabka & Jan Goebel & Carsten Schröder & Jürgen Schupp, 2016. "Shrinking Share of Middle-Income Group in Germany and the US," DIW Economic Bulletin, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research, vol. 6(18), pages 199-210.
    3. Richard Blundell & Luigi Pistaferri & Itay Saporta-Eksten, 2016. "Consumption Inequality and Family Labor Supply," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(2), pages 387-435, February.
    4. Yonatan Berman, 2022. "The Long-Run Evolution of Absolute Intergenerational Mobility," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 61-83, July.
    5. Miles Corak, 2013. "Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 27(3), pages 79-102, Summer.
    6. Nikoloulopoulos, Aristidis K. & Joe, Harry & Li, Haijun, 2012. "Vine copulas with asymmetric tail dependence and applications to financial return data," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 56(11), pages 3659-3673.
    7. Anders Björklund, 1993. "A Comparison Between Actual Distributions Of Annual And Lifetime Income: Sweden 1951–89," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 39(4), pages 377-386, December.
    8. Raj Chetty & Nathaniel Hendren & Patrick Kline & Emmanuel Saez, 2014. "Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 129(4), pages 1553-1623.
    9. Timm Bönke & Geraldine Dany-Knedlik & Laura Pagenhardt, 2023. "Neues DIW-Modell kann Einkommensverteilung am aktuellen Rand vorhersagen – Ungleichheit dürfte in diesem Jahr leicht zunehmen," DIW Wochenbericht, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research, vol. 90(24), pages 326-332.
    10. Orazio P. Attanasio & Luigi Pistaferri, 2016. "Consumption Inequality," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 30(2), pages 3-28, Spring.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zafar, Rafia, 2022. "Intergenerational Mobility in Income and Consumption: Evidence from Indonesia," SocArXiv uzcfs, Center for Open Science.
    2. Lekfuangfu, Warn N. & Odermatt, Reto, 2022. "All I have to do is dream? The role of aspirations in intergenerational mobility and well-being," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    3. Naguib, Costanza, 2019. "Estimating the Heterogeneous Impact of the Free Movement of Persons on Relative Wage Mobility," Economics Working Paper Series 1903, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.
    4. Brea-Martinez, Gabriel, 2021. "The beneficial impact of mother’s work on children’s absolute income mobility, Southern Sweden (1947-2015)," SocArXiv c27s8, Center for Open Science.
    5. Christian Dustmann & Bernd Fitzenberger & Markus Zimmermann, 2022. "Housing Expenditure and Income Inequality," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 132(645), pages 1709-1736.
    6. Diogo G. C. Britto & Alexandre Fonseca & Paolo Pinotti & Breno Sampaio & Lucas Warwar, 2022. "Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality," CESifo Working Paper Series 10004, CESifo.
    7. Nathan Deutscher & Bhashkar Mazumder, 2023. "Measuring Intergenerational Income Mobility: A Synthesis of Approaches," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 61(3), pages 988-1036, September.
    8. De Giorgi, Giacomo & Gambetti, Luca & Naguib, Costanza, 2020. "Life-Cycle Inequality: Blacks And Whites Differentials In Life Expectancy, Savings, Income, And Consumption," CEPR Discussion Papers 15182, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    9. Riphahn, Regina T. & Schnitzlein, Daniel D., 2016. "Wage mobility in East and West Germany," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 11-34.
    10. Paolo Pinotti & Diogo G. C. Britto & Alexandre Fonseca & Breno Sampaio & Lucas Warwar, 2022. "Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality," CReAM Discussion Paper Series 2322, Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), Department of Economics, University College London.
    11. Haan, Peter & Kemptner, Daniel & Lüthen, Holger, 2020. "The rising longevity gap by lifetime earnings – Distributional implications for the pension system," The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, Elsevier, vol. 17(C).
    12. Klaus Prettner & Andreas Schaefer, 2021. "The U‐Shape of Income Inequality over the 20th Century: The Role of Education," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 123(2), pages 645-675, April.
    13. Tomas Kennedy & Peter Siminski, 2022. "Are We Richer than Our Parents Were? Absolute Income Mobility in Australia," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 98(320), pages 22-41, March.
    14. Feld, Lars P. & Schmidt, Christoph M. & Schnabel, Isabel & Truger, Achim & Wieland, Volker, 2019. "Den Strukturwandel meistern. Jahresgutachten 2019/20 [Dealing with Structural Change. Annual Report 2019/20]," Annual Economic Reports / Jahresgutachten, German Council of Economic Experts / Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung, volume 127, number 201920.
    15. Jochen Mankart & Rigas Oikonomou, 2017. "Household Search and the Aggregate Labour Market," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 84(4), pages 1735-1788.
    16. Jo Blanden, 2019. "Intergenerational income persistence," IZA World of Labor, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), pages 176-176, January.
    17. Molnárová, Zuzana & Reiter, Michael, 2022. "Technology, demand, and productivity: What an industry model tells us about business cycles," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 134(C).
    18. Francesco Andreoli & Eugenio Peluso, 2016. "So close yet so unequal: Reconsidering spatial inequality in U.S. cities," Working Papers 21/2016, University of Verona, Department of Economics.
    19. Bennett, Patrick & Ravetti, Chiara & Wong, Po Yin, 2021. "Losing in a boom: Long-term consequences of a local economic shock for female labour market outcomes," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Absolute mobility; Intergenerational mobility; Income distributions; Consumption; Inequality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • H0 - Public Economics - - General
    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp2068. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bibliothek (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/diwbede.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.