This paper studies short-run wealth mobility in a heterogeneous agents, incomplete-markets model. Wealth mobility has a “hump-shaped” relationship with the persistence of the stochastic process governing labor income: low when shocks are close to i.i.d. or close to a random walk, and higher...

We survey the literature on income mobility, aiming to provide an integrated discussion of mobility within and between generations. We review mobility concepts, descriptive devices, measurement methods, data sources, and recent empirical evidence.