TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Wienand, Tim
AU  - Magdalou, Brice
AU  - Nock, Richard
AU  - Hufe, Paul
        TI  - Opportunity-Sensitive Social Welfare
        PY  - 2026/Oct/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18986
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp18986
        AB  - We develop a framework to evaluate income distributions from the perspective of an opportunity-egalitarian social planner. Through an original axiomatic route that bridges normative economics and decision theory under ambiguity, we characterize a class of social welfare functions governed by a single parameter capturing the planner's aversion to inequality of opportunity. We obtain a 'mean-divergence' representation that separates economic efficiency from a penalty for inequality of opportunity, as well as a stochastic dominance criterion for robust welfare comparisons. We apply these theoretical results to analyze opportunity-sensitive social welfare in the United States across birth cohorts and regions. Mapping standard estimates of intergenerational mobility into our framework, we show that welfare rankings vary substantially with the assumed degree of inequality-of-opportunity aversion. We transparently gauge the extent of this normative ambiguity by providing bounds on the ranking of birth cohorts and regions, respectively.
        KW  - inequality of opportunity
KW  - intergenerational mobility
KW  - welfarism
KW  - utilitarianism
KW  - social welfare measurement
        ER  -