Who is on the rise in Austria: Wage mobility and mobility risk

In this paper we investigate earnings mobility in Austria from the angle of individual persons. Earnings mobility over time has two aspects: Positional changes and the volatility of earnings over time. Whereas the further is a positive outcome, more volatility as such can be seen as negative. We use Austrian data from tax authorities to find out how population characteristics are related to these two concepts of earnings mobility. Our main results concern initial positions: The higher up you are at the beginning, the more difficult is further positional advancement, moreover, in terms of volatility we see that those in the lowest quantiles of the earnings distribution face the highest volatility of earnings positions over time. © Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006.