Measuring capabilities is a major challenge for the operationalization of the capability approach. Structural equation models (SEM) are being increasingly used as one possible methodology for estimating capabilities, but a certain skepticism remains about their appropriateness. In this paper, we...

The analysis of inequality of opportunity has become an important issue in recent economic literature, especially in Latin America. This study proposes a link to the capability approach and analyzes the performance of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades in terms of...

The main aim of this study is to evaluate the performance of structural equation models in the estimation of capabilities in a multidimensional development space. We simulate an artificial society using agent-based modelling techniques. Our artificial world is generated to closely resemble a...

In this paper I show that recently proposed methods to quantify the level of inequality of opportunity are likely to be downward biased when the dependent variable is a proxy for an unobserved concept. Using a multidimensional framework of development, such as the capability approach, or a...

In this document I present some methods used to de ne poverty lines. The purpose of this paper is to give a general overview of existing methods, without going into technical details, to show what is used in Latin American countries and nally to illustrate some of the concepts presented in the...

This paper aims at establishing a clear link between different types of inequality and life satisfaction in Europe. Indices of income inequality and of inequality of opportunity are proposed to identify the relationship with life satisfaction using six waves of the European Social Survey (ESS)....

Determining policy priorities is a challenging task for any government because there may be, for example, a multiplicity of objectives to be simultaneously attained, a multidimensional policy space to be explored, inefficiencies in the implementation of public policies, interdependencies between...

The access to credit is generally seen as an important ingredient for development. However, over the last years reports on families contracting excessive debt and falling into credit traps have also increased. In this paper I develop a model of family credit behavior based on insights from...

This paper discusses the measurement of ex-ante inequality of opportunity for binary outcome variables. We argue that the use of scale but not translation invariant inequality measures such as the dissimilarity index might be problematic depending on the aim of the study. The main concern is...

In this paper I develop a model to reproduce the phenomenon of high intergenerational correlations in education particularly observed in Latin American Countries. The model is based on empirical evidence and implemented through agent based modeling techniques. The effect of conditional cash...