They keyword you're looking for is intragenerational mobility, it'll pull up plenty of research, here's one link I found: http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/

They keyword you're looking for is intragenerational mobility, it'll pull up plenty of research, here's one link I found: http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/income-mobility-over-a-lifetime-might-be-on-the-decline/ http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/income-mobility-over-a... But actually, I would go the opposite way and say we need to look at multigenerational inequality. Which is to say that our current inequality metrics might look really good even if you were bound to being only 1 quintile higher or lower than your grandparents, every individual would oscillate in a small range through their life but once accumulated it would show up in the data as lots of mobility. What I'd be really interested in seeing is how likely a family is to climb out of poverty over a few generations and then to stick there or how likely a rich family is to sink into poverty and stick there.