Do Short-Term Observed Income Changes Overstate Structural Economic Mobility?*
提出统计检验，证明发展中国家家庭收入动态研究中观测到的经济流动性部分源于暂时性收入的随机波动，短期面板数据会高估结构性经济流动性。
The recent empirical literature on household income dynamics in developing countries has tended to find considerable intertemporal economic mobility and thus inferred that a large proportion of poverty is transitory. This article introduces a statistical test which shows that these findings are partially driven by stochastic changes in transitory income. Estimates of total economic mobility are inversely correlated with the panel spell length. For short data spells, estimated total economic mobility is significantly greater than the underlying structural economic mobility because of short-lived movements across the poverty line that cancel out over periods of multiple years.