TODAY NE&EP webinar on Monday 16th: Brice Magdalou on Opportunity-sensitive social welfare
may...@gmail.com
Dear all,
Our next NE&EP webinar will take place on Monday 16th at 5pm (Paris time).
The speaker is Brice Magdalou (University of Montpellier). Brice will present:
Opportunity-sensitive social welfare (joint with Paul Hufe; abstract below)
You can join the webinar with the following link: https://uio.zoom.us/j/69509673469
Add to your calendar: https://uio.zoom.us/webinar/u50od-CuqTguHN0GocNG7ZXLy4EuPKqtPQiT/ics
We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Maya Eden and Paolo Piacquadio
Title: “Opportunity-sensitive social welfare”
Abstract: In this paper, we develop a new framework to evaluate income distributions from the perspective of an opportunity-egalitarian planner. This planner faces a costly trade-off between treating people as equals and treating them unequally to equalize opportunities. The resolution of this trade-off depends on the extent of the planner’s inequality-of-opportunity aversion. We use this framework to derive social welfare and inequality measures that are governed by a single parameter capturing the planner's preferences. We bring these measures to the data and analyze inequality of opportunity in the United States. Concretely, we build on the recent literature on intergenerational mobility and study the robustness of its conclusions about time trends and spatial variation in unequal opportunities to assumptions about the planner's preference for equal opportunities. We show that many commonly held conclusions about trends and spatial variation in inequality of opportunity are highly sensitive to the assumed degree of inequality-of-opportunity aversion.