Does more education really mean less poverty and less inequality? How much less? What are the transmission mechanisms? This paper presents the results of a micro-simulation exercise for the Brazilian State of Ceará, which suggests that broad-based policies aimed at increasing educational...

Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of...

This paper departs from John Roemer's formulation of the theory of equality of opportunities. It seeks 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...

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We...

This paper proposes two related measures of educational inequality: one for educational achievement and another for educational opportunity. The former is the simple variance (or standard deviation) of test scores. Its selection is informed by consideration of two measurement issues that have...

Using nationally representative, economy-wide data, this paper investigates the relative importance of trade-mandated effects on industry wage premiums; industry and economy-wide skill premiums; and employment flows in accounting for changes in the wage distribution in Brazil during the 1988-95...

Despite a recent surge in the number of studies attempting to measure inequality of opportunity in various countries, methodological differences have so far prevented meaningful international comparisons. This paper presents a comparison of ex-ante measures of inequality of economic opportunity...