Inequalities and Inequalities of Opportunities
I have published a number of papers in the area of inequalities and inequalities of opportunities.
Our paper on Inequality of Opportunities in Health, published in Health Economics in 2010 (here) was one of the first two papers on inequalities of opportunities applied to health and since then, Inequality of Opportunities has become a new line of research in Health Economics.
Following this first publication, I have published a number of other papers in the area both theoretical and methodological as well as one commissioned book chapter and given a number of invited international and national seminars.
My current work in progress in this area includes an empirical research work on inequalities of opportunities in education in Bangladesh and a theoretical research work on the measurement of health inequalities over the lifecycle.
“Inequality of opportunity at school in rural Bangladesh: to what extent are pupils’ efforts shaped by family background?” [working title] with Niaz Asadullah, Alain Trannoy and Gaston Yalonetzky
Abstract - The notion of inequality of opportunity draws a distinction between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” sources of differences in wellbeing outcomes. While legitimate differences can be attributed to effort and illegitimate differences to circumstances (beyond people’s control), the cut between the two sources is not clear. Specifically, legitimate inequality may be undermined by the importance of the correlation between effort and circumstances (e.g. family background) as underlined by John Roemer. This paper focuses on evaluating the importance of the correlation between circumstances and effort when measuring inequalities of opportunity in education. The school experience and performance are particularly interesting because they strongly impact on future adult life. We use data from a unique survey on secondary school education in rural Bangladesh with two indicators of performance, 14 indicators of students’ effort, and a large set of circumstances. We find that the correlation between effort and circumstances represents 40% of the contribution of effort to the total variance in both Mathematics and English test scores. This result suggests that while the normative position on how to treat the correlation between circumstances and effort made little difference in health in France (10% according to Jusot et al. 2013), it does matter in education, and confirms the importance of social determinism at school.
“Measuring inequities in health over the lifecycle: age-specific or lifecycle perspective?” with Damien Bricard, Florence Jusot and Alain Trannoy
Abstract - Health status is theoretically conceptualised as a dynamic outcome that evolves over time along the lifecycle; most inequalities studies focus on snapshots of inequality and rarely consider health inequality over the lifecycle. Measuring inequality over the lifecycle requires dealing with two dimensions: ages and individuals. One can measure inequality over the lifecycle by firstly aggregating health over ages and then measuring inequality by aggregating over individuals; this is the lifecycle perspective. Otherwise, one can measure inequality over individuals at each age and then aggregate inequality over ages; this is the age-specific perspective. This paper proposes a methodology to measure health inequality over the lifecycle from both the age-specific and lifecycle perspectives. We use data from a British cohort study and focus on self-assessed health and death as measures of health. We use first order stochastic dominance and Hammond dominance criteria to respect the ordinal and qualitative nature of those health outcomes and measure health inequality. Our results show that the two perspectives impact on the existence and the magnitude of inequalities of opportunities in health in the UK. While the lifecycle perspective provides a global view of inequality of opportunity, the age-specific perspective highlights (i) a change in the dynamic of inequality of opportunity favoring people born in South-East UK in the second part of their lifecycle, (ii) a reinforcement of inequality of opportunity between regions over the lifetime.