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

Francisco Ferreira, Paolo Brunori () and Pedro Salas-Rojo ()
Additional contact information
Paolo Brunori: London School of Economics
Pedro Salas-Rojo: CUNEF

No 691, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

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: pages
Date: 2026-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2026-691.pdf First version, 2026 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Inherited inequality and the distribution of opportunities in the United States, China, India, and South Africa (2026)
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:inq:inqwps:ecineq2026-691

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).