Equality of Opportunity and the Distribution of Long-Run Income in Sweden

Anders Bjorklund (), Markus Jantti and John Roemer

No 5466, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: 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 personal effort, rather than by circumstances beyond their control. We use data for Swedish men born between 1955 and 1967 for whom we measure the distribution of long-run income, as well as several important background circumstances, such as parental education and income, family structure and own IQ before adulthood. We address the question: in Sweden, given its present constellation of social policies and institutions, to what extent is existing income inequality due to circumstances, as opposed to 'effort'? Our results suggest that several circumstances, importantly both parental income and own IQ, are important for long-run income inequality, but that variations in individual effort account for the most part of that inequality.

Keywords: inequality; family background; equality of opportunity; long-run income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 D31 D63 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published - revised version published in: Social Choice and Welfare, 2012, 39, 675-696

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5466.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Equality of opportunity and the distribution of long-run income in Sweden (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5466

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().