Measuring mobility

Our new approach to mobility measurement involves separating out thevaluation of positions in terms of individual status (using income, social rank,or other criteria) from the issue of movement between positions. Thequantification of movement is addressed using a general concept of distancebetween positions and a parsimonious set of axioms that characterise thedistance concept and yield a class of aggregative indices. This class of indicesinduces a superclass of mobility measures over the different status conceptsconsistent with the same underlying data. We investigate the statisticalinference of mobility indices using two well-known status concepts, related toincome mobility and rank mobility.