Long-Term Evolution of Inequality of Opportunity

Maurizio Bussolo, Daniele Checchi and Vito Peragine

No 13044, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the four largest European economies (France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy). Relative IOp represents an important portion of total income inequality, with values ranging from 30 to 50 percent according to the standard deviation of logs. For all the countries, relative IOp shows a stable or declining time trend. In addition to these descriptive findings, the paper proposes a theoretical framework identifying channels of transmission which may affect IOp. Using this framework, a decomposition focuses on the role of three variables: a) intergenerational persistence in educational attainment, b) return of education, and c) networking activity of parents. While the first two variables exhibit a declining trend in all countries, which as predicted by the model should produce a decline in IOp, the third one appears to be rising in some countries, counteracting the effects of the first two.

Keywords: education mobility; decomposition methods; inequality of opportunity; returns to education; family networking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 E24 I24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Inequality , 2023, 21, 277 - 323

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13044.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Long-Term Evolution of Inequality of Opportunity (2020)
Working Paper: Long-Term Evolution of Inequality of Opportunity (2020)
Working Paper: Long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity (2019)
Working Paper: Long-Term Evolution of Inequality of Opportunity (2019)
Working Paper: The long term evolution of inequality of opportunity (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13044

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().