Inequality of Opportunity in Education, Occupation, Income, and Wealth

Sanni Kuikka , Stockholm University
Max Thaning, Stockholm University

Using egalitarian Sweden as a test case, we study how children’s socioeconomic life chances are patterned by family background and other circumstances while growing up. We use an integrative methodological approach to estimate lower and upper bounds of (in)equality of opportunity (IOp) in four socioeconomic status (SES) outcomes - namely, education, occupation, income, and wealth. With the aim of bridging diverse approaches to study intergenerational inequality, we compare supervised machine learning methods alongside with dynamic individual and sibling fixed effects models, to retrieve a range of measures of IOp. We use Swedish register data, containing longitudinal, intergenerationally linked, individual level information. To capture the inequality inducing background circumstances as wide as possible, we include neighborhood and school level predictors, in addition to multidimensional SES. This approach in combination with high-quality register data allow us to capture the wider conditions children are brought up in, and that are likely to influence their life courses and socioeconomic outcomes.

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 Presented in Session P3. Migration, Economics, Policies, History