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The analysis of many economic phenomena requires partitioning societies into groups (for instance, along the lines of their gender, parental background or place of birth) and studying the extent at which these groups are distributed with different intensities across ordered realizations of a relevant outcome, such as income, health or cognitive score levels. When the groups are similarly distributed, their members could be seen as having equal chances to achieve any of the attainable outcomes. Otherwise, a form of dissimilarity prevails. We introduce a new, robust dissimilarity criterion for ordering multi-group distributions defined over ordinal outcomes, we characterize it in terms of  basic transformations of the data regarded to as unambiguously preserving or reducing dissimilarity  and provide an equivalent empirical test based on sequential dominance conditions. An application to Swedish data highlights the usefulness of the test to identify the intergenerational distributional consequences of a large education reform which took place in the 1960s.

Supplementary material:   [slides]   [replication code]   [Long version]


We consider the problem of comparing allocations of opportunities from the standpoint of an ethical observer placed behind a veil of ignorance about her group belonging. We provide axiomatic arguments to compare allocations by means of an expected valuation of the expected utility of being in a group. The main theorem identifies the unique empirical criterion for comparing allocations - conic extension of Zonotope inclusion - that is agreed upon by all such ethical observers exhibiting aversion towards inequality of opportunities. We provide various interpretations of the criterion and illustrate its possible application by evaluating inequalities of educational opportunities among castes and gender in India


This paper investigates empirically whether urban poverty has affected the spread of COVID-19 at the early onset of the pandemic and whether mobility restrictions alleviated such influence. Using ACS data combined with data on mobility and confirmed cases and addressing bias arising from measurement error and unobserved confounders, we find that a standard deviation increase in urban poverty rises contagion by about 0.55-0.7 cases over 100,000 residents, approximately 1/4 of the incidence of COVID-19 registered on the median American city by the end of April 2020. Stay-at-home orders are found to be less effective in cities where poverty is less evenly distributed across neighborhoods


This paper contributes to the literature on neighborhood inequality along both theoretical and empirical lines. We introduce a new neighborhood inequality index (NI) to measure income inequality within individual neighborhoods of varying sizes, and study its normative and statistical properties. The NI index is used in combination with a large database of income distributions defined on a fine-grained geographic scale to study neighborhood inequality in American cities over the last 35 years. Inequality within small individual neighborhoods is found to grow steadily over the period, albeit heterogeneously across cities. We investigate the intergenerational consequences of a rising NI index, exploiting labor market responses to minimum wage regulation as a source of identification. We find that lower neighborhood inequality during childhood makes income mobility for children with a disadvantaged parental background more likely.

Supplementary material: (i) Executive summary   (ii) Online appendix


Estimating the causal impact of COVID-19 on the multiple dimensions of child well-being requires quasi-random variation in exposure to it, which is unlikely to occur during a pandemic. Recent developments in econometrics have highlighted the relevance of subjective evaluations of treatment effects in the absence of randomization. This paper delivers new evidence, based on  primary data collected in Luxembourg in Spring 2021 on a sample of children aged 12-16, about their subjective evaluations of the treatment effects of COVID-19. Effects are recovered through specific survey questions, asking children to compare actual outcomes with counterfactual ones, that they believe would have occurred in the absence of COVID-19.  We present and discuss such estimates and study their heterogeneity along the line of demographics, family and housing resources and school experience.


The standard theory suggests that the urban quality of life should be measured by the economic value of the amenities offered in the city. These amenities are valued by their implicit marginal prices, obtained from housing market hedonic regressions. These prices approximate the representative consumer's willingness to pay for these amenities at the margin, but do not support welfare considerations. In this paper, we adjust the standard measure to determine the monetary value of any bundle, which might substantially differ from the bundle of the marginal quantities of amenities. Our methodology relies on a welfare measure that represents the representative consumer's willingness to give up (accept) to insure (forego) that a change in the current distribution of amenities across areas will take place, keeping the level of utility unchanged. We obtain a new measure, the value-adjusted quality of life index, that can be identified from parametric models of consumer preferences. We use this index to measure the quality of life in the city of Milan.


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