The aim of this project is to empirically investigate the relationship between equality of opportunity and subjective well-being. Differently form the only previous contribution on this topic, this project will employ panel data and individual information of inequality of opportunity from the SHIW database for Italy, BHPS for the UK, SOEP for Germany and PSID for the US. We use the concept of opportunity gap proposed by Fleurbaey and Schokkaert (2009) and recently extended by Moramarco, Palmisano & Peragine (2020). According to the latter article, the opportunity gap methodology is performed in three steps. The use of disaggregated information on inequality of opportunity, that is, equality of opportunity measured at the individual level, allows to make use of panel data techniques which are better able to identify the relationship between equality of opportunity and subjective well-being.
Studying equality of opportunity has always been a very important topic, and it has become even more urgent during the current situation under which the important decrease in economic growth will have a conspicuous negative impact on inequality in general. Covid-19 has endangered the limited gains made in the recent decades in terms of improvement of subjective well-being. Therefore, clarifying the role of unfairness in a persons¿ life satisfaction, can help researchers create more accurate economic models and design more effective policies, for example on education, healthcare, taxation and pensions.
Differently from the only previous contribution on this topic (Ravazzini and Cháves-Juárez, 2018), this project will employ panel data and individual information of inequality of opportunity. As stated above, the increasing availability of survey data has better put into evidence that the focus of the analysis of distributional phenomena is the individual and not the community as a whole. In particular, it allows to account for the possibility that the effect of IOp on subjective wellbeing might change across individuals. This individual-based perspective is now also central in the political agenda, as emerges from the list of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The use of disaggregated information on inequality of opportunity, that is, inequality of opportunity measured at the individual level allows to make use of panel data techniques, which are better able to identify and measure effects that are simply non detectable in a cross-sectional analysis.