TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Bühler, Jonas
AU  - Davis, Jonathan
AU  - Häner-Müller, Melanie
AU  - Mazumder, Bhashkar
AU  - Schaltegger, Christoph
        TI  - Inequality of Opportunity in Times of Rising Global Inequality: USA vs. Switzerland
        PY  - 2026/Jun/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18764
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp18764
        AB  - We provide a comparative analysis of inequality of opportunity for children’s future success in Switzerland and the United States during an era of rising global inequality. Leveraging Swiss administrative earnings data and U.S. survey data, we estimate sibling correlations for cohorts entering the labor market in the early 1970s and early 1980s in the two countries. We find a sharp rise in sibling correlations and income inequality in the United States during the 1980s similar to Davis & Mazumder (2026) who study intergenerational income mobility. However, we find that both inequality
and inequality of opportunity in Switzerland remained remarkably stable. Sibling correlations in long-run income consistently hovered below 15% across both cohorts in Switzerland, whereas in the United States they nearly doubled, from 15.4% to 30.6%. These findings thus position Switzerland as a salient counterfactual to the U.S. case.
        KW  - inequality of opportunity
KW  - income inequality
KW  - social mobility
KW  - time trends
KW  - sibling correlation
        ER  -