Inequality of Opportunity in Brazil: A Corrigendum

François Bourguignon (1, 2) , Francisco H. G. Ferreira (3, 4) , Marta Menéndez (5, 6)

1 PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques
2 PSE - Paris School of Economics
3 The World Bank
4 IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor
5 DIAL - Développement, institutions et analyses de long terme
6 Université Paris Dauphine-PSL

This note acknowledges and corrects a programming error in our paper "Inequality of Opportunity in Brazil" (Review of Income and Wealth, 53(4), 585-618, 2007). Once the error is corrected, our bounds approach to the identification of individual model parameters in the presence of omitted variable biases is much less useful than indicated in the original paper. In the specific context of the measurement of inequality of opportunity, this implies that the decomposition of overall inequality of opportunity into direct and indirect effects is not reliable. However, the parametric approach introduced in our paper remains useful for obtaining a lower-bound estimate of overall ex-ante inequality of opportunity, as proposed by Ferreira and Gignoux (2011).

Mots clés: Brazil; Inequality of opportunities; Omitted variable bias

Domaines: Economies et finances

François Bourguignon, Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Marta Menéndez. Inequality of Opportunity in Brazil: A Corrigendum. Review of Income and Wealth, 2013, 59 (3), pp.551-555. ⟨10.1111/roiw.12045⟩. ⟨halshs-00879769⟩