| This dissertation focuses on two issues: the measurement of income mobility and counterfactual distributions. In the first essay, I propose a new framework for measuring income mobility based on how increases and decreases in income, considered separately, affect social welfare. The framework also unifies major concepts from previous measures. The second essay applies this method to measuring how intergenerational income mobility has changed over the last 20 years for blacks, Hispanics, and whites in the United States. The third essay extends current econometric techniques and proposes a simple method to construct a counterfactual distribution of the location of a variable across space. |
