This paper develops a criterion to assess equalization of opportunity that is consistent with theoretical views of equality of opportunity. We characterize inequality of opportunity as a situation where some groups in society enjoy an illegitimate advantage. In this context, equalization of...

Using the data from the China Household Income Project (CHIP) in 2002, 2007, and 2013, this chapter examines the effects of a series of social policy reforms on the economic distance between the rich and poor in each of the urban, rural, and migrant household sectors. We find that over the years...

We present here a general framework, expressed by a system of nonlinear differential equations, suitable for the modeling of taxation and redistribution in a closed society. This framework allows one to describe the evolution of income distribution over the population and to explain the...

The higher-end tail of the wealth distribution in India is studied using recently published lists of the wealth of richest Indians between the years 2002–2004. The resulting rank distribution seems to imply a power-law tail for the wealth distribution, with a Pareto exponent between 0.81 and...

We have numerically simulated the ideal-gas models of trading markets, where each agent is identified with a gas molecule and each trading as an elastic or money-conserving two-body collision. Unlike in the ideal gas, we introduce (quenched) saving propensity of the agents, distributed widely...