Rising educational attainment and opportunity equalization: Evidence from France.

Educational policies are widely recognized as the means par excellence to equalize opportunities among children with different social and family backgrounds and to promote intergenerational mobility. In this paper we focus on the French case and we apply the opportunity equalization criterion proposed by Andreoli, Havnes and Lefranc (2019) for evaluating the effect of rising compulsory schooling requirements in secondary education. Our results show that such education expansion has a limited redistributive effects on students earnings distribution. Nonetheless, we provide evidence of opportunity equalization among groups of students dened by family background circumstances.