We propose a methodology to evaluate social projects from an (equality of) opportunity perspective by looking at their effect on (parts of) the distribution of outcomes conditional on morally irrelevant characteristics, taken here to be parental education level and indigenous background. The...

We put together the different conceptual issues involved in measuring inequality of opportunity, discuss how these concepts have been translated into computable measures, and point out the problems and choices researchers face when implementing these measures. Our analysis identifies and...

We develop a directional measure of income mobility. This measure can be expresssed as a rank dependent mean of the individual mobilities in society and allows to give more weight to lower individual mobilities. The class includes the measures of directional mobility encountered in the...

This paper examines optimal redistribution in a model with high and low-skilled individuals with heterogeneous tastes for labor, that either work or not. With such double heterogeneity, traditional Welfarist criteria including Utilitarianism fail to take the compensation-responsibility trade-off...

To establish the nature of the link between income distribution and economic growth by means of a standard growth regression, one needs to collapse an entire income distribution into a scalar measure of inequality. Due to data shortages macro-economic research has typically been forced to use...

We analyze the consequences of three types of specification error for conditional distribution functions F (y|a): measurement error in y, measurement error in a and omitted conditioning variables. The paper uses exact results to obtain conditions under which the effect of the misspecification on...

We characterize two different approaches to the idea of equality of opportunity. Roemer’s social ordering is motivated by a concern to compensate for the effects of certain (non-responsibility) factors on outcomes. Van de gaer’s social ordering is concerned with the equalization of the...

We formalize the concept of structural mobility and use the framework of subgroup consistent mobility measurement to derive a relative and an absolute measure of mobility that is increasing both in upward structural mobility and exchange mobility. In our empirical illustration, we contribute...

Many third world countries seem to fail to create a growth-promoting and peaceful institutional framework and are plagued by ethnic, religious or social conflict. This paper focuses on the impact of primary commodities on group behavior and, thus, on the nature of the resulting societies....

In a game of imperfect information, the paper analyzes whether different types of intervention by third parties can ensure that political (ethnic, religious, social, . . . ) groups within a country will pursue a cooperative strategy and how easy it is to predict their effects. We conclude that a...