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Measurement of inequality of opportunity: A normative approach

Bosmans,Kristof
; 
Öztürk,Emel
Abstract
We develop a normative approach to the measurement of inequality of opportunity. That is, we measure inequality of opportunity by the welfare gain obtained in moving from the actual income distribution to the optimal income distribution of the total available income. Our study brings together the main approaches in the literature: we axiomatically characterize social welfare functions, we obtain prominent allocation rules as their optima, and we derive familiar classes of inequality of opportunity measures. Our analysis captures moreover the key philosophical distinctions in the literature: ex post versus ex ante compensation, and liberal versus utilitarian reward.
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Date
2021-06
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Tilburg University Research Output Collection
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Keywords
Inequality of opportunity, Income inequality, Responsibility, Social welfare, D31 - Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions, D63 - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement, SDG 1 - No Poverty, SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities
Citation
Bosmans, K & Öztürk, E 2021, 'Measurement of inequality of opportunity: A normative approach', Journal of Economic Inequality, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 213-237. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-020-09468-1
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14602/73815
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