Measuring the contribution of stratification and social class at birth to inequality of opportunity

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new analytical approach to inequality of opportunity that allows for the decomposition of the impact of initial circumstances into the impact of social class at birth and the impact of social stratification based on an identity marker in a society in which there is a dominant and a marginalized group. We derive the dominance conditions associated with this approach. These dominance conditions allow for robust rankings of distributions. We also explore two potential views on the inequality of opportunity: the pro-poor and the meritocratic perspectives. To make the identification of all robust orderings implementable using survey data, we discuss an estimation approach and statistical inference for these dominance tests. Finally, to illustrate the empirical relevance of the proposed dominance conditions, we use data from the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Surveys for 1998, 2006, 2012, and 2018 to study the changes in inequality of opportunity and the change in the contributions of social class at birth and gender stratification over this period in Egypt.