professeur à l’Université de Cergy-Pontoise professeur à l’Université de Vérone

This thesis focuses on the measurement of dissimilarity in the distribution of relevanteconomic attributes and inequality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity has gained popularityfor defining the relevant equalitarian objective for the distribution of a broad range of social andeconomic outcomes among social groups. I show that equality of opportunity concerns in policyevaluation always rely on dissimilarity comparisons between conditional distributions, and I provideempirically testable criteria to implement these comparisons. In the first chapter, I characterizeaxiomatically the dissimilarity partial order for discrete conditional distributions of groups acrossoutcome classes. I prove that, when classes are permutable, dissimilarity is rationalized by matrixmajorization and implemented by checking Zonotopes inclusion, while when classes are ordered thedissimilarity criterion resorts on a finite number of Lorenz majorization comparisons among groups’proportions, performed at different cumulation stages of the overall population. In the second chap-ter, I discuss the relevance of the dissimilarity partial order for the study of segregation at individuallevel. I fully characterize a well defined family of segregation indicators and I study one of them,the Gini exposure index, by using Italian data. The final chapter presents the equalization of op-portunity criterion for outcome achievements. The guiding principle is that equality of opportunityis reached if there is no consensus, for a given class of preferences, in determining the disadvantagedgroup out of pairwise comparisons. I use the changes in (lack of) consensus on the existence andon the extent of this type of disadvantage to characterize the equalization of opportunity criterion.Meaningful restrictions and possible aggregation procedures are also discussed. I motivate that thiscriterion is identified within the rank dependent utility model, and I provide innovative inferenceresults for inverse stochastic dominance to test it. Two applications on French data illustrate theequalizing impact of educational policies taking place early in students life.