The main goal of this paper is to document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the four largest European economies (France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy). Relative IOp represents an important portion of total income inequality, with values ranging from...

In this paper we provide a new methodology to measure opportunity inequality and to decompose overall inequality in an quot;ethically offensivequot; and an quot;ethically acceptablequot; part. Moreover, we provide some empirical applications of these new evaluation tools: in the first exercise,...

In this paper we propose different criteria to rank income distributions according to equality of opportunity. Different from existing ones, our criteria explicitly recognize the interplay between circumstances and effort. We characterize them axiomatically and we compare them with existing...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....

Estimates of the level of inequality of opportunity have traditionally been interpreted as lower bounds due to the downward bias resulting from the partial observability of circumstances that affect individual outcome. We show that such estimates may also suffer from upward bias as a consequence...

This paper asks whether prioritarianism – the view that social welfare orderings should give explicit priority to the worse-off – is consistent with the normative theory of equality of opportunity. We show that there are inherent tensions between some of the axioms underpinning...

We axiomatically characterize two classes of poverty measures which are sensitive to inequality of opportunity – one a strict subset of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to differences in opportunities faced by people...

This paper proposes a definition of equality of educational opportunities. Then, it develops a comprehensive model that allows to test for the existence of equality of opportunity in a given distribution and to rank distributions according to equality of opportunity. Finally, it provides an...

We axiomatically characterize two classes of poverty measures which are sensitive to inequality of opportunity - one a strict subset of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to differences in opportunities faced by people with...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....