Rank Dependent Relative Mobility Measures

We develop a directional measure of income mobility. This measure can be expresssed as a rank dependent mean of the individual mobilities in society and allows to give more weight to lower individual mobilities. The class includes the measures of directional mobility encountered in the literature. We apply our measure to compare income mobility between the United States and Germany, and find that giving more weight to the bottom end of the mobility distribution reverses the mobility ranking.