Meritocracy and inherited advantage in the United States
利用美国区域数据拟合模型，量化精英体制（市场回报人力资本）与继承优势（回报家庭背景），发现两者与区域特征相关，并能额外解释投票行为。
We fit a model to US regional data on income, inequality and intergenerational mobility to derive ‘meritocracy’ and ‘advantage’: high meritocracy implies local labour markets reward human capital; high advantage implies they reward class background. We then characterise how these indices correlate with observable characteristics of regions, finding intuitive results which correlate with common understanding of these terms. Finally, we show there is information in the model: our indices provide extra explanatory power for voting behaviour in the United States. We conclude that using our model to interpret the data at the regional level reveals new insights into regional characteristics.