EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Gender and inequality of opportunity in Sweden

Karin Hederos, Markus Jantti and Lena Lindahl
Additional contact information
Karin Hederos: Stockholm University

Social Choice and Welfare, 2017, vol. 49, issue 3, No 9, 605-635

Abstract: Abstract This paper considers the role of gender in generating inequality of opportunity. Using data on long-run income for Swedish men and women, we explore to what extent income inequality is due to circumstances beyond individuals’ control, such as gender and parental income, rather than to differences in individuals’ choices. The key idea is that a society has achieved equality of opportunity if there is no income inequality that is due to circumstances. Analyzing men and women separately, we find that circumstances account for up to 31% of income inequality among men and up to 25% among women. We conclude that there is greater equality of opportunity among women than among men. When we analyze men and women together, treating gender as a circumstance, at most 38% of income inequality can be attributed to circumstances. Gender accounts for up to 13% of income inequality, making gender the single most important circumstance in accounting for inequality in long-run income in Sweden.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-017-1076-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:sochwe:v:49:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s00355-017-1076-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-017-1076-2

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2024-09-15
Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:49:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s00355-017-1076-2