Opportunity, Mobility and the Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality
This programme brings together interdisciplinary perspectives, ideas and findings on horizontal inequalities and intergenerational transmission of well-being. It explores how inequality of opportunity links inequality of outcomes to intergenerational transmission (immobility): when opportunities for today’s children are very unequal, their lives as adults are bound to be very different.
This research programme is led by Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira and Dr Paolo Brunori
Not all inequalities are the same. Philosophers, religious leaders, politicians, policymakers and – most importantly – people at large seem to find some forms of inequality more morally repugnant than others. There is a widely held view, for example, that inequalities due to factors beyond a person’s control – such as race, biological sex, place of birth or family background – are normatively unacceptable. There is growing evidence that they may also hinder society from prospering economically. Many feel that society should seek to redress and, if possible, eliminate such inequalities, also known collectively as inequality of opportunity.
Because many critical factors that shape people’s wellbeing independently of their own choices are inherited from one’s family, genetically or otherwise, the study of inequality of opportunity is also closely related to that of the intergenerational transmission of outcomes such as income, education and health. That transmission is, of course, the converse of intergenerational mobility. In fact, we argue that inequality of opportunity provides a natural link between inequality of outcomes and intergenerational transmission (immobility): when opportunities for today’s children are very unequal, their lives as adults are bound to be very different. That inequality is then transmitted to the next generation as a new round of unequal life chances. And so the cycle of inequality persistence sustains itself.
Highlights
- ‘To Have and Have Not – How to Bridge the Gap in Opportunities’.
This important study provides an in-depth analysis of inequality of opportunity across OECD countries and discusses policies that can reduce the gap between those born with and without broad access to opportunities. It builds on the methodology developed for the Global Estimates of Opportunity and Mobility (GEOM) database.
The research programme focuses on the following three areas:
1. Making sense of the myriad approaches to measuring intergenerational transmission and improving the comparability of these measures.
Although there is much conceptual common ground among scholars analysing horizontal inequalities, opportunity and mobility, empirical findings are highly sensitive to methodological choices. This limits our ability to compare empirical results and to see the "big picture". We actually know very little about how horizontal inequalities are distributed around the globe. This is due at least in part to the fact that our "findings" about horizontal inequalities are crucially dependent on the kinds of data we have: cross-section surveys versus panel surveys; surveys versus registries and other administrative data sources; income data versus data on surnames; etc. Even among a certain class of surveys, much depends on sample size; the availability of information on circumstance variables; and so on. Moreover, different techniques, ranging from standard inequality decompositions to more sophisticated machine learning algorithms can also yield different "stories" (although sometimes there is a reassuring measure of agreement…).
There are also different practices as to whether intergenerational persistence should be studied looking at the transmission of a single outcome across generations, such as income or education; or incorporate the effect of a wider range of family and personal characteristics from one generation on the next. The research programme investigates what implications these data- and method-dependencies have for comparisons over time and, especially, across countries. The final aim is to propose methods to improve the comparability of measures obtained, across countries, over time, and across disciplines.
2. How do opportunity and intergenerational transmission relate to people’s understanding of fairness? Political philosophers, sociologists, economists and others have long grappled with the question of what makes a society just, or unjust. For many, issues of inequality and inequity feature prominently, but there is a wide range of views as to which inequalities are acceptable or unacceptable; and as to how trade-offs that might arise between the pursuit of equity and other desiderata (such as certain rights and freedoms, or prosperity) should be dealt with. This area or research lies at the confluence of many academic disciplines and could be a fruitful topic for work at the III.
3. What are the consequences of widespread unequal opportunity and intergenerational persistence? When large groups of people – such as women; people of colour; people with disabilities; people of lower castes; and so on – are excluded from opportunity, it stands to reason that human talent is likely to be underdeveloped and underused. Does this have consequences beyond unfairness – e.g. on the efficiency of resource allocation; on investment and growth; on people’s health; on crime or political conflict?
Global Estimates of Opportunity and Mobility
This database is a joint project of the International Inequalities Institute and a network of international research institutions: Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Bari, Italy. Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias, Mexico, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, VélezReyes+ philanthropic platform, Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies, Argentina, Asian Develomnet Bank and Monash University, Australia.
- Professor Francisco H G Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director International Inequalities Institute, LSE.
- Dr Paolo Brunori, Associate Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III and Associate Professor of Public Economics, University of Florence.
- Dr Paul Hufe, Assistant Professor, University of Bristol.
- Victoria Hünewaldt, PhD Candidate, Department of Economics, University of Siena.
- Dr H. Xavier Jara, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute, LSE.
- Professor Stephen Jenkins, Faculty Associate, LSE III and Professor of Economic and Social Policy, Department of Social Policy, LSE.
- Professor Stephen Machin, Director of CEP and Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, LSE.
- Dr Daniel Mahler, Senior Economist, Development Data Group, The World Bank.
- Dr Domenico Moramarco, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics and Finance, University of Bari Aldo Moro.
- Dr Guido Neidhöfer, Senior Researcher, ZEW Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research and DAAD-Professor of Economics, Turkish-German University in Istanbul.
- Dr Amaia Palencia-Esteban, Visiting Senior Fellow, International Inequalities Institute, LSE.
- Dr Flaviana Palmisano, Associate Professor of Public Economics, Sapienza University of Rome.
- Professor Vito Peragine, Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Finance, University of Bari Aldo Moro.
- Tatiana Pérez Martínez, Visiting Research Student, LSE III and PhD candidate in Development Economics and Local Systems, University of Florence.
- Professor Patrizio Piraino, Professor of Education, Labor, and Development and Director of the Ford Program in Human Development Studies and Solidarity, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame.
- Professor Lucinda Platt, Faculty Associate, LSE III and Professor of Social Policy and Sociology, Department of Social Policy, LSE.
- Fabian Reutzel, PhD Candidate, Paris School of Economics.
- Dr Pedro Salas-Rojo, Visiting Fellow, International Inequalities Institute, LSE.
- Dr Giovanna Scarchilli, Post-doctoral fellow, University of Milan.
- Dr Louis Sirugue, Research Officer, International Inequalities Institute, LSE.
- Dr Francesca Subioli, Visiting Research Student, LSE III and Post-doctoral Researcher in Economics, Roma Tre University.
- Pedro Torres-Lopez, PhD Candidate, Department of Social Policy, LSE.
- Dr Annaelena Valentini, Visiting Fellow, LSE III and Post-doctoral Researcher in Economics, University of Florence.
- Dr Roy van der Weide, Senior Economist, Poverty and Inequality Research Team, The World Bank.
- Yohei Yoshizawa, PhD candidate, Department of Political Economy, King's College London.
- Dr Giorgia Zotti, Visiting Research Student, LSE III and Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Economics and Finance, University of Bari Aldo Moro.
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Speaker: Paul Hufe - Room for Happiness? Cultural Heterogeneity in Cross-Country Well-Being Comparisons Using Big Data
24 January 2024
Speakers: Mateo Sere and Koen Decanq - Measuring local, salient economic inequality in the UK
9 November 2023
Speaker: Joel Suss - Survey to Survey Imputation when External Covariates Matter: Estimating Inequality of Opportunity in Mexico
7 July 2023
Speaker: Pedro Torres-Lopez
Events
Dynastic measures of intergenerational mobility
Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series
31 January 2023
Speaker:
Dr Flaviana Palmisano, Associate Professor of Public Economics, Sapienza University of Rome
This seminar suggests a simple and flexible criterion to assess relative intergenerational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes, such as (continuous) earnings or (discrete and ordinal) education levels, and captures dynastic improvements of such outcomes at different points of the initial distribution.
Using Machine Learning to Decompose Inequality: The Case of Opportunity in South Africa
Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series
Tuesday 25 October 2022
Speaker:
Dr Pedro Salas-Rojo, Research Officer, LSE III
We illustrate an exact analogy between how the phenomenon of inequality of opportunity may be measured and how transformation trees - a machine learning algorithm developed by Hothorn and Zeileis (2021) predicts an output variable based on a set of features. Then, we use data from South Africa (2017) to analyze inequality of opportunity. Our estimates show that the magnitude of this phenomenon is much greater than what has been suggested in the past.
Programme launch event: An Idea of Equality for Troubled Times
3 February 2022
Watch the video. Listen to the podcast.
Speakers: Professor Joseph Fishkin, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law; Professor Marc Fleurbaey, Professor of Economics, Paris School of Economics; Dr Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology, LSE
Upper secondary tracks and student competencies: A selection or a causal effect?
Part of the Opportunity and Mobility Seminar Series
10 November 2021
Speaker: Dr Moris Triventi, Associate Professor in Quantitative Sociology University of Trento
Discussant: Dr Sara Geven, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Amsterdam
Comparing Distributions of Ordinal Data: Theory and Empirics
Part of the Opportunity and Mobility Seminar Series
17 November 2021.
Speaker: Professor Stephen Jenkins, Convenor, Global Inequalities Observatory Research programme, LSE III and Professor of Economic and Social Policy Department of Social Policy, LSE
Discussant: Professor Vanesa Jordá, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Cantabria
The Social Life of Inequality: why unequal countries stay that way
Part of the Opportunity and Mobility Seminar Series
9 March 2022
Watch the video. Listen to the podcast.
Speaker: Dr Jonathan Mijs, Lecturer in Sociology, Boston University and Visiting Fellow, LSE III
Discussant: Siyu Li, PhD student, Lille Center for Sociological and Economic Studies and Research
Expectations about the Productivity of Effort and Academic Outcomes: evidence from a randomized information intervention
Part of the Opportunity and Mobility Seminar Series. Co-hosted by the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
6 April 2022
Speaker: Professor Emilia Del Bono, Professor of Economics, University of Essex, and Director of the Centre for Micro Social Change
Discussant: Professor Matthias Parey, Professor of Economics, University of Surrey and ZEW Research Associate
Spatial & temporal disparities in air pollution exposure at Italian schools
Part of the Opportunity and Mobility Seminar Series. Co-hosted by the Department of Sociology, University of Trento.
10 May 2022
Speaker: Risto Conte Keivabu, Researcher, Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute
Discussant: Giovanna Scarchilli, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, INEQUALITREES Project, University of Trento
First Generation Elite: the role of school social networks
Part of the Opportunity and Mobility Seminar Series. Co-hosted by the Department of Economics and Law of Sapienza University of Rome
25 May 2022
Speaker: Professor Emma Tominey, Professor of Economics, University of York
Discussant: Dr Anthony Lepinteur, Research Associate, Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Luxembourg
Grants received by the Opportunity, Mobility and the Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality programme:
- Sustainability Performances, Evidence and Scenarios
- GEOM: The Opportunity and Mobility Lab – a grant from VelezReyez+ Foundation
Collaboration between III researchers and OECD
On 22 September 2025, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched its new report ‘To Have and Have Not – How to Bridge the Gap in Opportunities’. This important study provides an in-depth analysis of inequality of opportunity across OECD countries and discusses policies that can reduce the gap between those born in relatively disadvantaged circumstances and those with broad access to opportunities.
This report builds on the methodology developed for the Global Estimates of Opportunity and Mobility (GEOM) database. Researchers at the III collaborated with the OECD by providing support in the estimation approach. The OECD adopted a machine-learning method to measure inequality of opportunity, inspired by earlier publications by Professor Francisco H.G. Ferreira, Dr Paolo Brunori, and Dr Pedro Salas-Rojo.
This report paves the way for future collaboration between the III and the OECD on the measurement of inherited inequalities.
Opportunity, Mobility, and Inherited Inequalities Visiting PhD Grant
The Visiting PhD Grant offered by the Opportunity and Mobility (OM) research programme is intended to support research students from other universities to spend one academic term at LSE International Inequalities Institute.
This visiting period aims to assist doctoral researchers in their own research, granting them temporary access to the facilities and supervision offered by III members as well as establishing a network of academic contacts within the field of Intergenerational Mobility, Inequality of Opportunity, and Inherited Inequalities.
The Visiting PhD Grant package for 2026/27 includes:
- £104/week for LSE tuition fees (paid by III directly)
- Up to £100/week for accommodation (reimbursement)
- Up to £250 for travel costs (reimbursement)