Measuring and Implementing Equality of Opportunity for Income

Departing from the welfarist tradition, recent theories of justice focus on individual opportunities as the appropriate standard for distributive judgments. Justice is seen as requiring equality of opportunity, instead of outcomes, among the individuals. To explore how this philosophical conception can be translated into concrete public policy, we select the in-come as relevant outcome and the income tax as the relevant redistributive policy, and we address the following questions: (i) what is the degree of opportunity inequality in an income distribution? (ii) how to design an opportunity egalitarian income tax policy? Both positive and normative criteria for ranking income distributions on the basis of equality of oppor-tunities are derived. Moreover, we characterize an opportunity egalitarian income tax policy and we formulate criteria for choosing among alternative tax systems.

Higher education and equality of opportunity in Italy

This paper proposes a definition of equality of educational opportunities. Then, it develops a comprehensive model that allows to test for the existence of equality of opportunity in a given distribution and to rank distributions according to equality of opportunity. Finally, it provides an empirical analysis of equality of opportunity for higher education in Italy.Equality of Opportunity, Higher Education, Stochastic Dominance

Ex ante versus ex post equality of opportunity

We study the difference between the ex post and the ex ante perspectives in equality of opportunity (EOp), and the possibility of a clash between them. We argue that ex ante EOp is a potential trap because someone motivated by ex post EOp may be led to believe that ex ante EOp is another natural embodiment of the same idea. As we show, it is not. Moreover, we explore the relationship between the ex post/ex ante tension and the well documented clash between the "compensation principle" and various "reward principles": we show that the tension between reward and compensation only exists if one endorses an ex post view of EOp; on the contrary, it vanishes if one adopts an ex ante view of equality of opportunity.equality of opportunity, ex ante/ex post, compensation, reward

On Preference, Freedom and Diversity

We study the problem of ranking sets of options in terms of freedom of choice. We propose a framework in which both the diversity of the options and the preferences of the agent over the options do play a role. We formulate some axioms that reflect these two aspects of freedom and we study their logical implications. Two diifferent criteria for ranking sets are characterized, which generalize some of the rankings proposed so far in the literatureRanking Sets; Freedom of Choice; Diversity relations

Measuring long-term inequality of opportunity

In this paper, we introduce and apply a general framework for evaluating long-term income distributions according to the Equality of Opportunity principle. Our framework allows for both an exante and an ex-post approach to EOp. Our ex-post approach relies on a permanent income measure defined as the minimum annual expenditure an individual would need in order to be as well off as he could be by undertaking inter-period income transfers. There is long-term ex-post inequality of opportunity if individuals who exert the same effort have different permanent incomes. In comparison, the ex-ante approach focuses on the expected permanent income for individuals with identical circumstances. Hence, the ex-ante approach pays attention to inequalities in expected permanent income between different types of individuals. To demonstrate the empirical relevance of a long-run perspective on EOp, we exploit a unique panel data from Norway on individuals’ incomes over their working lifespan.equality of opportunity, social welfare, inequality, permanent income, intertemporal choice, ex-ante, ex-post.

Fair and Unfair Income Inequalities in Europe

This paper analyses the extent of income inequality and opportunity inequality in 25 European countries. The present work contributes to understanding the origin of standard income inequality, helping to identify potential institutional setups that are associated to opportunity inequality. We distinguish between ex ante and ex post opportunity inequality. We find that ex ante equality of opportunity exhibits positive correlation with public expenditure in education, whereas ex post equality of opportunity is also positively associated to union presence and to fiscal redistribution.inequality of opportunity, income inequality

Semistable Higgs bundles on elliptic surfaces

We analyze Higgs bundles on a class of elliptic surfaces, whose underlying vector bundle has vertical determinant and is fiberwise semistable. We prove that if the spectral curve of the bundle is reduced, then the integrability condition for the Higgs field is automatically satisfied, and the Higgs field takes values in the pull-back of the canonical line bundle of the base curve of the elliptic fibration. We then prove that if the bundle is fiberwise regular with reduced (respectively, integral) spectral curve, and if its rank and second Chern number satisfy an inequality involving the genus of the base and the degree of the fundamental line bundle of the fibration (respectively, if the fundamental line bundle is sufficiently ample), then the Higgs fields acts by tensoring with a global 1-form on the surface. We apply these results to the problem of characterizing slope-semistable Higgs bundles with vanishing discriminant on the surface, in terms of the semistability of their pull-backs via maps from arbitrary (smooth, irreducible, complete) curves to the surface