to the majority of the cells in the matrix, but not all of them. In fact, 60 percent of the cells in the IOC matrix in 2009 exceeded their corresponding value in 2000, but 38 percent of the cells were _below_ their value compared with 2000.<sup>33</sup> In summary, this is not an unambiguous pattern of increasing or decreasing inequality of opportunities by circumstance.<sup>34</sup> The five most influential circumstances for inequality of opportunity are parents’ education, income per capita, urban-rural location, number of children in the household, and regional location. The second panel of Table 7 reports for each circumstance the mean of the inequality penalties across all opportunities, in other words, the mean of the column in the IOC matrix for the corresponding circumstance, in the initial and final periods.<sup>35</sup> Circumstances are listed in decreasing order of magnitude. The five most influential circumstances are at least twice as important as gender, presence of the elderly, and the presence of both parents in the household. Moreover, those circumstances correspond to the set of most influential circumstances in 2000, except that income per capita, which was the first most influential circumstance at the beginning of the decade, was replaced by parents’ education at the end of the period.

**Table 7. Analysis of the IOC Matrix: Inequality of Opportunity by Circumstance, 2000 and 2009**

|_Distribution of {__s}_|_2000_||**_2009_**|
|---|---|---|---|
|Mean|1.2||1.7|
|1st Quartile|0.1||0.2|
|Median|0.5||0.9|
|3rdQuartile|1.3||2.2|
|_Circumstance_|_Mean of {IO_|_Cs} by circ_|_umstance*_|
|Parents Eduaction|1.9||2.5|
|Income per capita|2.2||2.3|
|Urban-rural location|1.6||2.2|
|Number of children|1.9||2.1|
|Regional location|1.4||2.0|
|_Circumstance_|_Frequency of high_|_value {IOC_<br>_**_|_s} by circumstance_|
|Income per capita|7||8|
|Number of children|7||5|
|Regional location|4||6|
|Parents Eduaction|7||5|
|Gender|1||2|
|Presence of elderly|0||2|
|Presence of parents|0||2|
|Urban-rural location|5||2|

(*) list only the five most unequalizing circumstances based on the mean of the column corresponding to each circumstance in the IOC matrix (see Tables A.7a and A.7b in the appendix). ( **) reports the count of cells in the column corresponding to each circumstance of the IOC matrix with values in the top quartile of the distribution, that is the number of cells indicating inequality of opportunities by circumstance. Source: HIECS 2000 and 2009 and DHS 2000 and 2008. Author's calculations.

Comparing means indicates broad trends but carries the risk of missing significant effects of certain circumstances on specific opportunities or the spread of the influence of each circumstance across the set of opportunities. To detect those cases and complement the previous analysis, the third panel

> 33 See Tables A.5-1-a, A.5-1-b, and A.5-1-c in the Appendix.

> 34 This result differs partially from the findings of Hassine (2009), which find a trend of decreasing inequality of opportunities as a share of total inequality of earnings, when comparing cohorts 40-49, 30-39, and 20-29. See Hassine (2009), Table 4, Model 3. This paper uses different inequality measures (Dissimilarity Index versus Gini, Atkinson, or Theil) and a different metric (access to opportunities versus earnings).

> 35 See Tables A.7-a and A.7-b in the Appendix.

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