Broadcast: Events

Join us for the 2nd public lecture in honour of Professor Michael Lipton. The lecture will be delivered by Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira of the London School of Economics (LSE) who will speak on ‘Inherited Inequality in Latin America’.

Professor Ferreira argues that relative measures of intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity are closely related approaches to quantifying the inheritability of inequality. In this lecture, he reviews both strands of literature in the context of Latin America, examining persistence in both income and educational attainment across generations. His analysis highlights very high levels of intergenerational persistence and inequality of opportunity in education, with inherited characteristics accounting for between 29% and 52% of the variation in years of schooling among the current generation.

His estimates of inequality of opportunity in income acquisition indicate that between 46% and 66% of contemporary income Gini coefficients can be explained by a relatively limited set of inherited circumstances. These findings suggest that Latin America is a region where inequality is highly inheritable by international standards. The review also identifies a wide range of estimates for intergenerational income elasticity, with considerable uncertainty arising from data limitations and methodological differences across studies.

This draws on joint work with Paolo Brunori, Guido Neidhofer, Pedro Salas-Rojo, and Louis Sirugue.

Hosted by the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex Business School and the Institute for Development Studies (IDS). This event celebrates the outstanding contributions that Professor Michael Lipton made to the Department of Economics and to IDS, and for the work he has inspired in the fields of development economics and agricultural economics.

Click here for more information and to register for the event

By: Clare Turner
Last updated: Monday, 26 October 2026