Economic Policy and Equality of Opportunity
将哲学中的机会平等定义应用于量化经济模型，分析教育补贴等政策对机会平等和总体不平等的影响，发现教育补贴虽能提高福利和降低不平等，但对促进机会平等作用有限。
We employ equality of opportunity (EOP) definitions that have appeared in the philosophical literature on distributive justice to a quantitative economic model that incorporates human capital investment and luck, within and across generations. The model is calibrated to the U.S. in 1990, and we operationalize EOP definitions by using children’s state space for their recursive decision problems as circumstances.We show that when comparing measures of EOP, the quantitative implications differ substantially depending on one’s view of parental luck and children’s outcomes. In counterfactual experiments, we find that education subsidies increase utilitarian welfare and decrease overall inequality, but do little to promote EOP. This is because on the one hand, if one takes the view that intergenerational investments should be rewarded, there is little room for improvement to begin with. But even when one takes the view that they should not be rewarded, much stronger redistribution is needed for the policies to have a quantitative impact.