We o er a model of equality of opportunity that encompasses di erent conceptions expressed in the public and philosophical debates. In addition to circumstances whose e ect on outcome should be compensated and e ort which represents a legitimate source of inequality, we introduce a third factor, luck, that captures the random factors whose impact on outcome should be even-handed for equality of opportunity to be satis ed. Then, we analyse how the various de nitions of equality of opportunity can be empirically identi ed, given data limitations and provide testable conditions. De nitions and conditions resort to standard stochastic dominance tools. Lastly, we develop an empirical analysis of equality of opportunity for income acquisition in France over the period 1979-2000 which reveals that the degree of inequality of opportunity tends to decrease and that the degree of risk of income distributions, conditional on social origin, appears very similar across all groups of social origins.
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Paper provided by THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise in its series THEMA Working Papers with number
2009-01.