Families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child's opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background. Cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers will most likely lower the degree of...

Equality of opportunity is an ethical goal with almost universal appeal. The interpretation taken here is that a society has achieved equality of opportunity if it is the case that what individuals accomplish, with respect to some desirable objective, is determined wholly by their choices and...

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...

This paper analyses the extent of income inequality and opportunity inequality in 25 European countries. The present work contributes to understanding the origin of standard income inequality, helping to identify potential institutional setups that are associated to opportunity inequality. We...

We examine how intergenerational income mobility responds to structural changes in a simple theoretical model of intergenerational transmission, deviating from the existing literature by explicitly analyzing the transition path between steady states. We find that mobility depends not only on...

We provide the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility for a developing country, namely Brazil. We measure formal income from tax and employment registries, and we train machine learning models on census and survey data to predict informal income. The data reveal a much higher...

This study estimates intergenerational correlations in mid-life wealth across three generations, and a young fourth generation, and examines how much of the parent-child association that can be explained by inheritances. Using a Swedish data set we find parent-child rank correlations of...

We link administrative data on tax returns across two generations of Italians to study the degree of intergenerational mobility. We estimate that a child with parental income below the median is expected to belong to the 44th percentile of its own income distribution as an adult, and the...

This paper documents an increasing intergenerational income persistence in China since economic reforms were introduced in 1979. The intergenerational income elasticity increases from 0.390 for the 1970–1980 birth cohort to 0.442 for the 1981–1988 birth cohort; this increase is more evident...

Our analysis of intergenerational earnings mobility modifies the Becker-Tomes model to incorporate the intergenerational transmission of employers, which is predicted to increase the intergenerational elasticity of earnings. About 6% of young Canadian men have the same main employer as their...