Genetic endowments are fixed at conception and matter for the educational attainment of individuals. Do investments in schooling environments mitigate or magnify the outcomes of this genetic lottery? Using data from a representative sample of US adolescents, we analyze the interdependent...

Are the United States still a land of opportunity? We provide new insights on this question by invoking a novel measurement approach that allows us to target the joint distribution of income and wealth. We show that inequality of opportunity has increased by 77% over the time period 1983-2016....

Rising income inequalities are widely debated in public and academic discourse. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by proposing a new family of measures of unfair inequality. To do so, we acknowledge that inequality is not bad per se, but that its underlying sources need to be taken...

In this paper we propose the use of machine learning methods to estimate inequality of opportunity. We illustrate how our proposed methods—conditional inference regression trees and forests—represent a substantial improvement over existing estimation approaches. First, they reduce the risk...

Equality of opportunity is an important normative ideal of distributive justice. In spite of its wide acceptance and economic relevance, standard estimation approaches suffer from data limitations that can lead to both downward and upward biased estimates of inequality of opportunity. These...

The consistent underestimation of inequality of opportunity has led some scholars to call into question the usefulness of such estimates. In this paper we argue that neglecting heterogeneity in the influence of circumstances across types as well as neglecting heterogeneity in type-specific...