How Much do Circumstances Beyond the Control of Persons Determine Income Inequality?
How Much do Circumstances Beyond the Control of Persons Determine Income Inequality?
Period:
01.12.2015 – 30.11.2016
Equality of opportunity (EOp, or IOp for inequality of opportunity) is said to hold if individual positions in an outcome distribution are independent of individual circumstances (e.g. parents’ education/occupation, ethnicity, gender), and only influenced by personal effort. Almost all empirical studies estimate that the extent to which income inequality is dependent on circumstances is quite small. In this project, we argue that many important circumstances that play a role in income determination have been ignored in the empirical literature.
