This paper proposes a method to decompose earnings inequality into a component due to unequal opportunities and a residual term. Drawing on the distinction between 'circumstance' and 'effort' variables in John Roemer's work on equality of opportunity, we associate inequality of opportunities...

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...

The main goal of this paper is to document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity and thus extend the recent empirical literature, which is mainly concerned with its measurement at a specific point in time. Using repeated cross-section surveys for five European...

The joint determination of aggregate economic growth and distributional change has been studied empirically from at least three different perspectives. A macroeconomic approach that relies on cross-country data on poverty, inequality, and growth rates has generated some interesting stylized...