Spanish Opportunity Lab

Spanish

Opportunity Lab

A research center dedicated to advancing our knowledge on the causes and consequences of social mobility and inequality in Spain using big data

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Opportunity
Atlas2.0

The development and improvement of the original Opportunity Atlas has been key to deepening the analysis of the state of equality of opportunity in Spain. Thanks to this progress, the Lab’s first academic project has produced new findings that offer a more detailed and accurate picture of inequality and social mobility in the country.

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Institutions

The Spanish Opportunity Lab is the result of a unique collaboration between Opportunity Insights at Harvard, the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics, Future Policy Lab, and the Felipe González Foundation

Academic institutions

Think-tanks

Team

The Spanish Opportunity Lab, a unique research center in Europe, brings together the expertise of academics and public policy experts from various institutions to improve equality of opportunity in Spain and its many dimensions through the use of big data

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Projects

Intergenerational Mobility in Spain: Geographic Analysis and Causal Neighborhood Effects

Utilizando datos administrativos de millones de familias, este artículo muestra una movilidad intergeneracional media-baja en España, con alta persistencia en la cima y deterioro reciente. Un aumento de 10 puntos percentil en la posición de los padres se asocia con un incremento de 2,74 puntos percentil en la de sus hijos en la edad adulta. La principal contribución metodológica es un modelo bayesiano jerárquico que ofrece estimaciones locales robustas. Con ellas, revelamos marcadas disparidades geográficas y que los efectos causales del barrio explican ~60% de la variación en movilidad ascendente.

Spanish Opportunity Lab Working Paper (LDO-WP-0001) (application,40 MB)

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Media appearances

Parent-child income map: In which cities does the social elevator work best?

A study shows the connection between the income of millions of parents and that of their children decades later. Its data reflect the weight of the family, but also of where you live. See the results by neighborhood and city

May 14, 2025

Atlas 2.0: A snapshot of opportunities

On this week’s episode of Todo por Hacer on Radio 5, we discuss a study analyzing social mobility in Spain. We speak with Javier Soria Espín, director of El Laboratorio de Oportunidades and lead of the Atlas de Oportunidades 2.0. This project uses big data tools to track the trajectories of millions of parents and children born in the 1980s and 1990s over more than 25 years, with the goal of understanding how opportunities are transmitted across generations.

September 3, 2025