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While attitudes towards income inequality have been widely studied, far less is known about attitudes towards wealth inequality. This paper investigates who evaluates wealth inequality as unfair and how far this differs from established patterns regarding attitudes towards income inequality. Based on a systematic literature review, we identify five stylized facts about the individual- and context-level determinants of attitudes towards income inequality. In line with these, we find that political orientation and perceptions of social mobility are strongly related to fairness attitudes towards wealth inequality using data from the European Social Survey. In contrast, individuals’ social class, occupation, income, and education do not seem to play a role. We further find substantial cross-national variation in attitudes towards wealth inequality similar to prior work: citizens of family-oriented countries are the most likely to view wealth inequality as unfairly large, whereas citizens of social-democratic countries show the lowest concern. Still, an overwhelming majority perceives wealth inequality as unfairly large across most European countries, suggesting that prevalent distributions of wealth are seen to violate principles of fairness.

Education is often treated as the key channel for intergenerational income mobility. Combining administrative social security, tax, and education registers, we document a striking mobility paradox in Austria: exceptionally high income mobility, with a rank-rank slope of about 0.10, coexists with low educational mobility, with an intergenerational correlation in years of schooling of 0.42. We show that vocational apprenticeships are a key driver of this paradox. Apprenticeships are disproportionately taken up by children from lower- and middle-income families, yet they lead to relatively high earnings, so that income distributions overlap substantially across education levels, particularly between apprenticeship and tertiary graduates. In addition, earnings vary widely across fields within educational tracks, and children of tertiary-educated parents tend to sort into lower-paying tertiary fields, further weakening the link between educational and income mobility.

Studies of heterogeneity in social mobility typically compare a few predefined groups. This paper instead develops the Conditional Mobility Forest, a nonparametric estimator of each child’s expected income rank at the 25th parental percentile. In the PSID, this measure of upward mobility varies by about 20 percentile ranks across children. A Shapley-value decomposition identifies race as the most important characteristic, followed by childhood health and parental age at birth. Parental education, homeownership, and household structure, despite strong raw correlations, contribute comparatively little once correlated characteristics are accounted for. These results can sharpen the targeting of social mobility policies.

In Austria, school entry is set by a birth-date cutoff, but schools decide whether a child is ready for school, and parents can apply for early admission. Using population records for 1.3 million children, we study who deviates from the entry rule and what these deviations do. Schools hold back the disadvantaged: children who do not speak German at home and children from low-income families are deferred far more often, while advantaged parents make most use of early admission, the reverse of the pattern in the United States. In borderline cases, deferral sharply reduces grade repetition in primary school but leaves later track placement and school completion unchanged: it largely shifts a school year that would otherwise be lost to repetition. Early admission, in contrast, raises repetition and lowers enrollment in university-track schools at sixteen.

Rankings of social mobility depend critically on which dimension and indicator are used, yet research offers little guidance on choosing among them. Using a conjoint experiment and a within-subject rating design with a broadly representative US sample (N = 1,002) and experts (N = 99), we provide the first systematic evidence on preferences over four dimensions of social mobility (education, occupation, income and wealth) and three indicators of income mobility. Income is the dimension the public values most, while the rank–rank slope, the indicator most prominent in the academic literature, receives the least public support. Incorporating these preferences into a composite measure substantially attenuates the Great Gatsby curve and shifts US state rankings by up to 32 positions.

This paper argues that the prevailing practice of estimating inequality of opportunity (IOp) fails to achieve two objectives of social science indicators: informing the public and guiding policy. As a thick concept, IOp requires a non-epistemic value judgment about the effect of circumstances on effort, yet almost all current estimates follow Roemer’s (1998) contested framework. This practice results in distributive epistemic injustice and leaves the underlying value judgment without democratic legitimacy. The paper democratizes this judgment along majoritarian and deliberative lines, drawing on evidence from behavioral economics and a vignette survey with experts in economics, philosophy, and sociology.