Adult economic status is positively correlated with parental economic status in every society for which we have data, but no democratic society is entirely comfortable with this fact. As a result, all democratic societies have adopted policies aimed at reducing the effect of family background on...

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across...

In spite of large structural expansions in higher education in Chile and Peru during the 1980s and 1990s, and a favourable growth context, levels of inequality are still very high in both countries and inequities in higher education persist. This paper investigates the role that higher education...

There is conceptually a big difference between inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcomes, and the policies needed to address the two different kinds of inequality are also very different. However, it is difficult to measure inequality of opportunity. This paper proposes a new measure...