Measures

Equalchances.org contains six key indicators:

Absolute inequality of opportunity is the Gini coefficient of the distribution of predicted equivalized household disposable income based three circumstances: parental education, parental occupation, origin.

Relative inequality of opportunity is the ratio between absolute inequality of opportunity and the total inequality in the distribution of the household equivalent disposable income.

Intergenerational elasticity of earnings is a summary measure of the degree of earnings persistence across generations. A higher elasticity reveals that offspring earnings are highly dependent on those of their parents, implying lower intergenerational mobility across generations. 

Intergenerational transmission of status refers to how strong is the relation between the socio-economic status of the fathers and their children. The higher is the ITS the stronger is the association between social background and the socio-economic status attained in adulthood, which is a sign of a less open society.

Absolute mobility in education  Absolute mobility is the probability a respondent has more education than the maximal educational attainment of his/her parents, conditional on the parents not having tertiary education.

Relative mobility in education
Relative mobility in education (Intergenerational persistence) is the coefficient from a regression of respondents’ years of schooling on the highest years of schooling of their parents.




Inequality

The scatterplot tool allows users to plot any indicator against a measure of total inequality, the Gini coefficient, this measure estimated by the World Bank. The original estimates are vailable here. In the few cases in which the Gini coefficient is not available for a specific year, estimates for the previous or following year are considered.


Inequality of opportunity (absolute)

Absolute inequality of opportunity is the Gini coefficient of the distribution of opportunities. The distribution of opportunities is obtained following the parametric approach introduced by Ferreira and Gignoux (2011). The model specification is selected by 10-fold cross validation as suggested by Brunori, Peragine and Serlenga (2018). The method extracts from total inequality the variability systematically correlated with three fundamental sources of unfair inequality: parental education, parental occupation and origin (e. i.  race, ethnic origin, area of birth).  The population of interests are all working-age respondents with non-missing information. Detailed information on the statistical method used available here


Inequality of opportunity (relative)

Relative inequality of opportunity is the ratio between absolute inequality of opportunity and the total inequality in the distribution of the household equivalent disposable income. Both inequality measures are obtained from the same sample.The figure is not directly interpretable as share of total inequality due to opportunity.


Intergenerational earnings mobility

Intergenerational earnings mobility summarizes the joint distribution of earnings for a sample of parent-child pairs. The database uses fathers and sons to represent two succeeding generations. A regression of a logarithmic measure of sons’ earnings on a logarithmic measure of fathers’ earnings is performed. The resulting coefficient, termed the intergenerational earnings elasticity, is estimated by a simple OLS. The elasticity denotes the percent difference in sons’ earnings observed for a 1 percent difference across the earnings of the fathers. As most countries do not have longitudinal income data to measure and link the earnings of two generations, the estimation follows the method proposed by Björklund and Jäntti  (1997), which uses retrospective information in repeated cross-sections to predict parental earnings.


Intergenerational transmission of status

The intergenerational transmission of status (ITS) measures the strength of the relationship between the socio-economic status (SES) of individuals and the SES of their fathers. SES is an index measured summarizing information on the individuals’ highest educational degree and occupational level using the the Polychoric Principal Component Analysis (PPCA), which accounts for the ordinality of the two observed indicators. ITS is measured using the Spearman correlation coefficient (?), a nonparametric measure of rank correlation that quantifies the degree of statistical dependence between the individuals’ relative position on the SES scale of origin and destination. The Spearman correlation (range: -1, +1) will be high when observations have a similar rank (high ITS) and low when observations have a dissimilar rank between the two variables (low ITS).


Mobility in education (Relative)

Intergenerational persistence is the coefficient from a regression of respondents’ years of schooling on the highest years of schooling of their parents. It measures the estimated impact of one additional year of schooling of parents on the years of schooling of respondents. A high intergenerational persistence is equivalent to a low level of relative mobility. When no years of schooling variable is available in the data, but educational categories are available, these categories have been transformed into a years of schooling variable using UNESCO guidelines and data.


Mobility in education (Absolute)

Absolute mobility measures the share of a cohort which obtains more education than the maximum level of education of their parents. Education is measured in five categories based on the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED): less than primary (ISCED 0), primary (ISCED 1), lower secondary (ISCED 2), upper secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary (ISCED 3–4), and tertiary (ISCED 5–8). Respondents whose parents have attained tertiary education are excluded since the respondents are unable to improve upon this level.