Inherited inequality and the distribution of opportunities in the United States, China, India, and South Africa

Paolo Brunori, Francisco H. G. Ferreira and Pedro Salas Rojo

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Researchers have sought to quantify the extent of inequality that is inherited from previous generations in multiple ways, including a large body of work on intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity. Many of the most frequently used approaches to measuring mobility or inequality of opportunity fit within a general framework which involves, as a first step, an estimation of the extent to which inherited personal characteristics can predict current incomes. We suggest a new method, within that broad framework, which is sensitive to differences across the entire conditional distributions of relevant population subgroups, rather than just in their means – a feature that makes it particularly well-suited to measuring ex-post inequality of opportunity. Sensitivity to differences in higher moments of the conditional distributions allow for a more comprehensive assessment of inherited inequality. We apply this approach to household income distributions in China, India, South Africa, and the United States, to illustrate how the method performs in different settings. We find that inherited inequality accounts for large shares of total inequality, from 36% in the United States to 59% in China, 62% in India, and 81% in South Africa.

Keywords: inherited inequality; opportunity; mobility; transformation trees; China; India; South Africa; United States (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 61 pages
Date: 2026-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/137083/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ehl:lserod:137083

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().