Playing the birth lottery in Europe

Annaelena Valentini, 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: We analyse the extent to which a person’s country of origin -alongside other factors beyond their control, such as their parents’ education and occupation- are predictive of adult incomes in Europe. Interpreting the joint predictive power of inherited circumstances as a measure of inequality of opportunity, we employ data-driven methods to estimate inequality of opportunity for household disposable incomes, treating Europe as a single entity. To ensure representativeness, we combine data from EUROSTAT and three different household surveys to construct a sample that represents the population of Europe, accounting for country-of-birth population shares within countries. We estimate overall inequality in Europe at 39 Gini points in 2019, with inequality predicted by ascriptive characteristics accounting for a full 23 Gini points. The country where a person was born accounts for 64% of the latter figure, emerging as the most significant predictor compared to other factors such as parental occupation (26%) and parental education (9%). The level of inequality of opportunity observed in Europe as a whole is comparable to that in China and India and significantly higher than estimates for the United States.

Keywords: inequality of opportunity; place of birth; migration; income distribution; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J60 O52 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2026-04
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:138074

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