It is well understood that political participation is stratified by socio-economic characteristics. Yet it is an open question how this finding bears on the normative evaluation of the democratic process. In this paper we argue that the equality of opportunity (EOp) concept furnishes an...

Many studies have estimated the effect of circumstances on income acquisition. Perhaps surprisingly, the fraction of inequality attributable to circumstances is usually quite small - in the advanced democracies, on the order of 20%. One reason for this is the lack of data on circumstance...

The consistent underestimation of inequality of opportunity has led some scholars to call into question the usefulness of such estimates. In this paper we argue that neglecting heterogeneity in the influence of circumstances across types as well as neglecting heterogeneity in type-specific...

Zu der anhaltenden Diskussion über Ungleichheit gehört die Frage nach Chancengerechtigkeit; das heißt, inwieweit sind die beobachteten Einkommensunterschiede den Individuen selbst oder aber ihren individuellen Lebensumständen zuzuschreiben. Nach einer kürzlich erschienenen Studie der OECD...

Equality of opportunity is an important normative ideal that concerns politicians and the larger public alike. In spite of its wide acceptance, current estimation approaches in the literature suffer from severe data restrictions that lead to biased estimates of inequality of opportunity. These...

Empirical evidence on distributional preferences shows that people do not judge inequality as problematic per se but that they take the underlying sources of income differences into account. In contrast to this evidence, current measures of inequality do not adequately reflect these normative...

Die ökonomische Ungleichheit steht im Fokus der aktuellen politischen Debatte. Paul Hufe, Andreas Peichl und Marc Stöckli zeigen in diesem Artikel, wie die Einkommen, der Konsum und die Vermögen in Deutschland verteilt sind. Dabei erläutern sie, welche Konzepte und Datengrundlagen in der...

What is the status quo of fairness in Europe? To answer this question, we have calculated multidimensional equality of opportunity in income, education, and health for 29 European countries in 2019. Our results show that inequalities of opportunity in education and health are lower than in...

Are the United States still a land of opportunity? We provide new insights on this question by invoking a novel measurement approach that allows us to target the joint distribution of income and wealth. We show that inequality of opportunity has increased by 77% over the time period 1983-2016....