however the empirical results suggest that an equityincreasing use of educational resources may be obtained through policies that provide the relevant signals to schools and teachers for instance providing financial incentives to qualified teachers may prove to be an effective tool for targeting disadvantaged students or areas thirdly this work fills a gap in empirical research by providing crosscountry as opposed to countryspecific evidence on the importance of early intervention policy for attenuating intergenerational socioeconomic inequalities in educational opportunities it suggests that childcare and early intervention policies could be effective to reach this objective finally the crosscountry analysis attempts to uncover the role played by social and labourmarket policies in influencing equality of educational opportunities given the positive relationship between intergenerational and crosssectional income inequality