In the light of the recent literature on the intellectual history of inequality, this paper offers the first survey and a tentative classification of the Italian literature addressing issues related to social mobility, from late-19th century to the 'Economic Miracle' of the 1950s. During these...

Surveys and experiments suggest that people hold workers more responsible for income gains stemming from merit, such as education, than circumstances, such as parental education. This paper shows how to design income taxes that account for merits. First, we introduce social welfare functions...

In this paper we provide a new methodology to measure opportunity inequality and to decompose overall inequality in an ethically offensive and an ethically acceptable part. Moreover, we provide some empirical applications of these new evaluation tools: in the first exercise, we compare the...

Equality of opportunity is an ethical goal with almost universal appeal. The interpretation taken here is that a society has achieved equality of opportunity if it is the case that what individuals accomplish, with respect to some desirable objective, is determined wholly by their choices and...

This paper examines optimal redistribution in a model with high- and low-skilled individuals with heterogeneous tastes for labor. We compare the extent to which optimal policies based on different normative criteria obey the principles of compensation (for differential skills) and responsibility...

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...

Inequality has increased considerably in many Western countries over the past decades. When dealing with economic inequality as a research subject the question "inequality of what among whom" arises. Analyses of inequality are typically concerned with the distribution of wages, earnings or...

Previous research provided ambiguous results on the association between average student performance and inequality of opportunity, as measured by the effect of family background on student achievement. In this paper we explore this association distinguishing between inequality of opportunity at...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....