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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | Annaelena Valentini (University of Florence); Paolo Brunori (University of Florence, III-LSE); Francisco H. G. Ferreira (III-LSE); Pedro Salas-Rojo (CUNEF) |
| Abstract: | We analyse the extent to which a person’s country of origin -alongside other factors beyond their control, such as their parents’ education and occupation- are predictive of adult incomes in Europe. Interpreting the joint predictive power of inherited circumstances as a measure of inequality of opportunity, we employ data-driven methods to estimate inequality of opportunity for household disposable incomes, treating Europe as a single entity. To ensure representativeness, we combine data from EUROSTAT and three different household surveys to construct a sample that represents the population of Europe, accounting for country-of-birth population shares within countries. We estimate overall inequality in Europe at 39 Gini points in 2019, with inequality predicted by ascriptive characteristics accounting for a full 23 Gini points. The country where a person was born accounts for 64% of the latter figure, emerging as the most significant predictor compared to other factors such as parental occupation (26%) and parental education (9%). The level of inequality of opportunity observed in Europe as a whole is comparable to that in China and India and significantly higher than estimates for the United States. |
| Keywords: | inequality of opportunity, place of birth, migration, income distribution, Europe. |
| JEL: | D31 J60 O52 O54 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2026-695 |
| By: | Bhalotra, Sonia (University of Warwick); Daysal, N. Meltem (University of Copenhagen); Jensen, Mathias Fjællegaard (University of Oxford); Jørgensen, Thomas (University of Copenhagen); Montpetit, Sebastien (Warwick University) |
| Abstract: | Using four decades of Danish administrative data, we estimate the intergenerational transmission of violent crime victimization. Sons are twice as likely, and daughters three times as likely, to be victimized if a parent was victimized, with stronger associations if the mother was the victim. Controlling for cohort, municipality, socioeconomic factors, parental cohabitation, and parental offending explains about 60% of this correlation. The link is weaker in higher-income families; it persists for sons, but is driven to zero for daughters. Further, children of victimized parents experience lower absolute income mobility, comparable to the Black-White difference for men in the United States. |
| Keywords: | victimization, violent crime, intergenerational transmission, income mobility |
| JEL: | K42 J12 J62 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18681 |
| By: | Richard Layard; Ekaterina Oparina |
| Abstract: | Optimal public policy requires a social welfare function defined over individual utilities. While there is substantial research on income-based social welfare functions, no published study has directly elicited public preferences over utility when measured by subjective wellbeing. Using a novel survey instrument with a representative UK sample (N=2, 068), we estimate the public's social welfare function for life satisfaction. We find significant aversion to wellbeing inequality, with a median isoelastic parameter $\alpha$=0.48. This implies a social welfare function approximately equal to the sum of square roots of individual utilities. The median respondent values improving the wellbeing of the least satisfied by one unit roughly twice as much as improving the most satisfied by one unit. Our findings provide ethically grounded distributional weights for wellbeing policy evaluation and cost-benefit analysis. |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2606.13752 |
| By: | Regina Calles; Tom Vogl |
| Abstract: | Latin America's momentous fertility transition is now in the domain of history, allowing a cohort perspective on the decline of completed fertility. Using census microdata from 17 Latin American countries, we track female birth cohorts from the 1920s to the 1970s by subnational region to document the extent to which cohort fertility decline coincided with other demographic and socioeconomic processes. Across cohorts within subnational regions, children ever born fell one-for-one with mortality decline. Expansions in urbanization, multigenerational living, women's and husbands' education, women's employment, and the non-agricultural sector all predicted declines in ever-born and surviving fertility, but women's education and sectoral composition were the dominant forces after covariate adjustment. Fertility decline was not systematically linked with improvements in children's outcomes, including school enrollment, literacy, primary completion, and non-employment. These cohort facts challenge theories of fertility decline centered on women's work and children's education but support others emphasizing women's education. |
| JEL: | J13 N36 O15 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35326 |
| By: | John A. List |
| Abstract: | Recent enthusiasm for field experiments, and especially for natural field experiments (NFEs), in which subjects go about their daily activities unaware that any study is taking place, has sometimes been read as a verdict against the laboratory. I argue that such a verdict is wrong. Through the lens of a simple rational-choice model, I show that the four standard experimental designs (laboratory, artefactual field experiment (AFE), framed field experiment (FFE), and NFE) are comparative-static restrictions of one maximization problem, each identifying a parameter the others cannot. The model reveals that each design type has distinctive strengths and weaknesses across various dimensions of knowledge creation, including the enforcement of the conditions for causal identification, the faithfulness of the experimental environment to the theory being tested, the identification of economic primitives via theoretical structure, and the ethics of studying human subjects. On each of the dimensions, the four design types are complements rather than rivals. Nowhere is this complementarity more evident than between the two extremes. The lab enforces the conditions for causal identification that the NFE must inherit from the market; the NFE recovers the parameter that governs behaviour in the wild, free of the selection, scrutiny, and environmental distortions the lab cannot escape. A research programme using all four designs together demonstrates something no single design can produce. The framework further accommodates the recent rise of online and survey experiments as natural extensions. Our discipline’s recent drift away from laboratory evidence is leaving an important structural gap that natural field experiments, however well conceived, cannot fill. |
| JEL: | C83 C89 C9 C91 C92 C93 H0 J01 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35338 |
| By: | Elizalde, Aldo; Hidalgo, Eduardo; Kampanelis, Sotiris |
| Abstract: | Can violence erase an ethnic identity? We study this question using the Shining Path insurgency in Peru (1980-1992), which sought to replace competing affiliations with a single class identity and killed roughly 70, 000 people, three-quarters of them Indigenous. Combining individual-level data on self-identification and mother tongue with event-level data on Shining Path violence, we implement a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation in exposure across cohorts at different stages of identity formation, within a matched border sample of pre-conflict comparable districts. Individuals exposed during their formative years (ages 0-19) are substantially less likely to identify as Indigenous or to speak an Indigenous language than cohorts whose identity was already formed when violence arrived. The effect is concentrated mostly in early childhood and particularly pronounced for mother tongue; the margin most directly shaped by parental transmission. Violence against non-Indigenous victims has no comparable effect. The mechanism is intra-group violence: because perpetrators were overwhelmingly co-ethnics from the same villages, visible Indigenous identity offered no protection and imposed costs. Consistent with this, the effect is strongest in Indigenous-homogeneous districts. |
| Keywords: | Ethnic identity, violence, civil conflict, Indigenous populations, Peru |
| JEL: | D74 J15 O15 N36 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:qucehw:341401 |