Income mobility among the elderly in Sweden during the 1990s

Using a large panel dataset, this article investigates the degree of, and explanatory factors for, income mobility amongst the elderly in Sweden during the 1990s. It contributes to literature on welfare indicators for the older population as it supplements the welfare picture of the income adequacy with insights into income certainty during old age. Our methodological approach is to work with the administrative register data for Sweden, and this allows us to use a reliable record of incomes for a large sample of the elderly. Results for Sweden-born and foreign-born elderly persons are analysed separately and compared with corresponding groups of people of working age. Not surprisingly, nearly all of our results indicate that the income of the older population is more stable than that of the working age population, and upward income mobility is not as usual among the elderly as among other groups. The multivariate regression analyses identify several explanatory factors affecting those elderly who experienced income mobility. Most importantly, the death of a spouse increases the probability of downward income mobility, particularly amongst women. These and other findings of this research point to triggers of income poverty in old age that should be taken into account in policies concerned with the level and indexation of retirement income of future pensioners.