Picturing mobility: Transition probability color plots

This talk presents a simple graphical device for visualization of patterns of income mobility. The device uses color palettes to picture information contained in transition matrices created from a fine partition of the marginal distributions. The talk explains how these graphs can be constructed using the user-written package spmap from Maurizio Pisati, briefly presents the wrapper command transcolorplot (for transition probability color plots) and demonstrates how such graphs are effective for contrasting patterns of mobility in different countries or contrasting observed patterns against benchmarks of maximal or minimal mobility.