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,...

The vast literature on earnings inequality has so far largely ignored the role played by hours of work. This paper argues that in order to understand earnings dispersion we need to consider not only the dispersion of hourly wages but also inequality in hours worked as well as the correlation...