We seek to quantify the role of education as a mechanism through which family background affects earnings. To this end, we propose a generalisation of statistical 'mediation analysis'. In our approach, the treatment and mediator can be multidimensional. This allows us to directly and flexibly...

To understand the degree of intergenerational mobility in the United States, and the differences between Americans and others, it is important to appreciate the workings and interaction of three fundamental institutions: the family, the market, and the state. But comparisons can also be...

This paper studies intergenerational mobility in Latin America and shows that, in addition to the well-documented fact that the Latin American income distribution is highly unequal, profound differences in opportunities persist from one generation to the next. Comparing final educational...

The United States and China are the world's largest economies. Together they are responsible for about one-third of the world's economic output. This paper aims to examine whether the two economic giants are also lands of opportunity where resources are allocated in a way that minimizes...

We review the economic literature on the impacts of the several dimensions of education upon intergenerational inequality persistency. It is firstly outlined that the critical increase in the population education level in all countries has not come with lower inequality. The basic tools of...

We propose a political economy model to explain cross-country differences observed in educational policies and to show how such heterogeneity is associated with the level of a country's development and inequality. Parents, heterogeneous in terms of income and their child's ability, vote over the...

This paper looks at the links between inequality of opportunity and views about the underlying processes that support economic success or failure. Unlike income inequality, inequality of opportunity isolates the extent to which inequality in circumstances beyond an individual's control...

The authors present evidence of a new propagation mechanism for wealth inequality, based on differential responses, by education, to greater inequality at the start of economic life. The paper is motivated by a novel positive cross-country relationship between wealth inequality and perceptions...

This paper examines how perceived importance of family background affect distributional pref-erences using two large-scale survey experiments. In the first experiment, we randomly inform respondents about the relationship between parental income and economic success later in life, which renders...

We evaluate the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of alternative government education policies to encourage college completion, such as making college free and improving funding for public schooling. To do so, we construct a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with...