Inherited inequality in Latin America

About this event

The first part of this Handbook Chapter draws on a “quantitative review” of the literatures on intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity in Latin America, which reports all estimates we can find for each country, classified by outcome (e.g., education or income); method (e.g., IGE, rank-rank regression coefficient, ex-ante parametric IOp estimate, etc.); and data type (e.g. survey, administrative data, test scores, etc.). Although details are confined to an appendix, the idea is to present the data graphically and draw out common patterns and robust findings (if any), while acknowledging the uncertainty arising from the various sources and methods used. The second part of the chapter reports original findings on inherited inequality for ten Latin American countries, based on random forest estimates of the share of current inequality that can be predicted by parental education, occupation, and race, as well as place of birth. These findings are benchmarked against analogous statistics for some 50-60 countries in other regions of the world.