Absolute Intragenerational Income Mobility in Iran over Three Decades

Aggregate measures such as income per capita or Gini index have limitations to answer how much of households are better or worse off following booms and busts, or crises and recoveries. However, intragenerational absolute income mobility, defined as the percent of households with higher income compared to their previous year, can be the answer. However, detailed panel data is needed to estimate the mobility but it is not available in developing countries at least in long term. In this paper, we use copula modeling and cross-sectional income data from the Household Expenditure and Income Survey of Iran and well approximate the mobility estimated by panel data for years 2010 to 2019 and then expand it to the three decades of 1990 to 2019 of Iran for the first time. According to our results, absolute intragenerational income mobility in Iran for urban households has been moving between 43% to 62% with a maximum in 2007. The key macroeconomic measure that is positively associated with mobility is economic growth