The authors depart from John Roemer's theory of equality of opportunities. They seek to determine what part of observed outcome inequality may be attributed to differences in observed "circumstances," including family background, and what part is due to "personal efforts." The authors use a...

This paper departs from John Roemer's theory of equality of opportunities. We seek to determine what part of observed outcome inequality may be attributed to differences in observed 'circumstances', including family background, and what part is due to 'personal efforts'. We use a...

This paper develops a micro-econometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, we also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for the conditional distributions of education,...