Opportunity advantage between income distributions

Carmen Herrero () and Antonio Villar
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Carmen Herrero: University of Alicante and Ivie

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2021, vol. 19, issue 4, No 9, 785-799

Abstract: Abstract This paper seeks to compare income distributions from the opportunity advantage viewpoint. That is a measure of how likely it is for a representative individual of one society to receive a higher income than a representative individual of another. Opportunity advantage tries to measure the income opportunities a society offers to an individual, relative to other societies, evaluated from the “veil of ignorance” viewpoint. We show that this notion can be precisely formalised and results in a complete and cardinal income distribution evaluation. We also present an empirical illustration of the gender differences in wage distributions in Spain after the financial crisis. The results show that this criterion offers new insights into the evaluation of differences in opportunity.

Keywords: Domination probabilities; Income distribution; Opportunity advantage; Ranking distributions; Veil of ignorance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10888-021-09488-5

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