Are the United States still a land of opportunity? We provide new insights on this question by invoking a novel measurement approach that allows us to target the joint distribution of income and wealth. We show that inequality of opportunity has increased by 77% over the time period 1983-2016....

We decompose changing gaps in life expectancy between rich and poor into differential changes in age-specific mortality rates and differences in "survivability". Declining age-specific mortality rates increases life expectancy, but the gain is small if the likelihood of living to this age is...

This paper studies the distribution of U.S. household income and wealth over the past seven decades. We introduce a newly compiled household-level dataset based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Complementing recent work on top income and wealth...

To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

We study inequality in the distribution of self-assessed health (SAH) in the United States and China, two large countries that have expanded their insurance provisions in recent decades, but that lack universal coverage and differ in other social determinants of health. Using comparable health...

We examine the determinants of income mobility and inequality in a Ramsey model with elastic labor supply and heterogeneous wealth and ability (labor endowment). Both agents with lower wealth and with greater ability tend to supply more labor, implying that labor supply decisions may have an...

We investigate the relationship between inequality and political support for public education funding in a model of endogenous fertility and school choice. Household income heterogeneity is consistent with the skewness of empirical income distributions. Inequality can drive education spending in...

A formula is derived for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that takes account of intragenerational income inequality and its evolution with economic growth. The social discount rate (SDR) should be adjusted to account for intragenerational and intergenerational inequality aversion and for risk...

Preserving environmental quality and addressing economic inequality both feature prominently in public discourse. Neither of these two issues can be fully understood in isolation, and policies aiming at one issue will increasingly have to consider interactions with the other. We synthesize...

We study the interplay between intragenerational and intergenerational equity in an economy with two countries producing and consuming from national capital stocks. We characterize the sustainable development path that a social planner would implement to achieve intertemporal egalitarianism. If...