This paper analyzes the relationship between income inequality and inequality of opportunities for income acquisition in nine developed countries during the nineties. We develop a new definition of equality of opportunity and show how it can be implemented empirically. Equality of opportunity is...

In the present paper we study the distributive impact of institutional change in developing countries. In such economies, economic institutions, such as property rights systems, may act to preserve the interests of a rich minority, but this depends crucially on the level of political equality....

Skaperdas (1996) characterized the contest success function (CSF), which stipulates the winning probabilities of the contestants, using respectively the scale invariance and translation invariance axioms. This paper first characterizes the entire family of CSFs that fulfils a convex mixture of...

Individual income is determined by free-will actions related to the level of effort exerted and by opportunities determined by aspects beyond the individual's control, such as family background, race, place of birth or health endowments. Taking human capital as the main engine of development, we...

The aim of this paper is twofold: a) To explore the evolution of occupational segregation of women and men of different racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. during the period 1940-2010; and b) to assess the consequences of segregation for each of them. For that purpose, this paper proposes a simple...

The assessment of income inequality can be investigated looking at the solution concepts of the cooperative game theory. We propose a multi-factorial decomposition of the Atkinson index by income sources and evaluate it as a cooperative game of the social cost of inequality. This framework...

This paper analyses the effects of the recent Economic Crisis on individual preferences for redistribution in 23 European countries. After implementing a decomposition of the variation in these preferences, it is showed that the crisis was highly significant in increasing support for...

The interplay of between- and within-country inequality, the relative contribution of each to overall global inequality, and the implications this has for who benefits from recent global growth (and by how much), has become a significant avenue for economic research. Drawing conclusions from...

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...

The ``Palma'' is the ratio of national income shares of the top 10 percent of households to the bottom 40 percent, reflecting Gabriel Palma's observation of the stability of the ``middle'' 50 percent share of income across countries so that distribution is largely a question of the tails. In...