JRC B2 Seminar. ‘Using Capital income to Proxy Family Background: An application to inequality of opportunity’, Hugo del Valle-Inclán (JRC-Sevilla)

The measurement of opportunity inequality has attracted increasing attention in recent years, despite the fact that its empirical application suffers from stringent data limitations. In this paper we address one of these problems: the scarcity of data on family background. We propose to use a widely available variable as alternative proxy of socioeconomic origin, instead of the traditional and sparse proxies commonly employed. This alternative proxy is capital income. Using data of 31 European countries we first successfully test the accuracy of our approach, and then we apply it to obtain many new inequality of opportunity estimates. These results are useful for the measurement of inequality of opportunity, but also in other areas of research where we want to account for family background.