Exclusión social, movilidad intergeneracional e igualdad de oportunidades. España en el contexto europeo

Equality of opportunity and social inclusion are basic pillars for a fair society, and many welfare state policies are devoted to their accomplishment. The aim of this project is to contribute to the current understanding of equality of opportunity and social exclusion, in order to help design better policies. The project is structured in three major objectives. The first one concerns equality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility. Achieving equality of opportunity is a paramount task which implies offsetting the effects of nature and nurture through the transmission across generations of attributes, attitudes and traits which are thought to be relevant for the personal development of individuals; be it better earnings profile, higher welfare, or any other indicator of success. We seek to contribute to the understanding of the intergenerational transmission mechanisms of human capital -i.e. income, education and health. This requires, first, studying intergenerational correlations of income, education and health, and then, investigating the causality of those relationships. Reported correlations may be spurious because parental human capital or income may be endogenous due to reverse causation or to the existence of an exogenous factor which determines both parents' and children's outcomes of interest. However, what matters for public policy is causality and not correlation. Hence, the main concern of our analyses is to determine the causal effects of parental income, education and health on children's attainments. We shall overcome the identification issues by exploring several identification strategies which rely on exogenous changes. Our second aim is to investigate the dynamics of social exclusion. Most of our evidence on social exclusion is based on static analyses-identification, quantification and characterisation-, where dimensions are treated as independent from one another.(...)