The literature has typically found that the distribution of socioeconomic factors like education, labor status and income does not account for the remarkable wealth inequality disparities between countries. As a result, their different institutions and other latent factors receive all the credit. Here, we propose to focus on one type of wealth inequality, the inequality of opportunities (IOp) in wealth: the share of overall wealth inequality explained by circumstances like inheritances and parental education. By means of a counterfactual decomposition method, we find that imposing the distribution of socioeconomic factors of the USA into Spain has little effect on total, financial and real estate wealth inequality. On the contrary, these factors play an important role when wealth IOp is considered. A Shapley value decomposition shows that the distribution of education and labor status in the USA consistently increase wealth IOp when imposed into Spain, whereas the opposite effect is found for the distribution of income.

文献通常发现，教育、劳动地位和收入等社会经济因素的分布并不能解释国家之间显着的财富不平等差异。结果，他们的不同机构和其他潜在因素得到了所有的信任。在这里，我们建议关注一种财富不平等，财富机会不平等（IOp）：由继承和父母教育等情况解释的整体财富不平等的份额。通过反事实分解方法，我们发现将美国社会经济因素的分布强加到西班牙对总体、金融和房地产财富不平等几乎没有影响。相反，在考虑财富 IOp 时，这些因素起着重要作用。