I employ high quality register data to present new facts about income mobility in Sweden. The focus of the paper is on regional differences in mobility, using a novel approach based on a multilevel model. This method is well suited when regions differ greatly in population size, as is the case in Sweden. The maximum likelihood estimates are substantially more precise than those obtained by running separate OLS regressions. I find that few regions are statistically significantly different from the Swedish average when measuring mobility in relative terms, while a greater number of regional differences emerge when focusing on absolute outcomes. Compared to growing up in the least favorable region, children from the most favorable region with parents located at the 25th percentile in the income distribution reach higher income ranks corresponding to approximately one monthly salary for an average Swedish worker per year.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.