| Title | A Copula-based Measurement of Inequality of Opportunity: With an Application to Intergenerational Body Mass Transmission in Indonesia |
| Date | November 26, 2020 (Thursday) 16:30-18:00 |
| Location | via Zoom |
| Abstract | Inequality of opportunity (IOP) is an illegitimate form of inequality whereby causes are not attributable to individual choices. Non-parametric and parametric methods have been widely used to measure IOP, but each of them tends to have a significant technical concern when the sources of inequality are not categorical and multi-dimensional, and when a severe specification error is suspected respectively. This paper introduces an alternative approach to measuring IOP using copulas which model various structures of dependence between efforts, factors for which individuals are responsible, and circumstances, factors beyond individual's control. Semi-parametric estimation of the outcome distribution and flexible modelling of the dependence structure between efforts and circumstances help to overcome the concerns in the existing methods. The method is applied to measuring inequality in the body mass index (BMI), attributable to its intergenerational transmission from parents to their adult offspring in Indonesia. A 21-year gap between the first wave and the last wave of the Indonesian Family Life Survey is exploited to estimate the relationship between parental BMI when offspring are below 15 years old and the BMI of grown-up offspring. The results show that 16.2 per cent of the overall variance in grown-up children's BMI is associated with intergenerational BMI transmission. |
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| Note | Joint with WINPEC seminar. Registration is required. Once you register, you can join all the seminar talks using the same link through the semester. Please make sure you put your name and affiliation. |