To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2005.03.001 Byline: Leonardo C. Gasparini (a), Santiago M. Pinto (b) Keywords: Equality of opportunity; Redistribution; Education; In-kind Abstract: This paper examines the argument for public provision of certain private goods, like education and health, based on equality of opportunity by studying the utility possibility frontier of a society in which there is a concern for the distribution of these goods. A given quality of education or health services can be consumed for free in the public sector, but people can opt-out and purchase their desired quality levels in the private sector. Some of the conclusions are: (i) a pure cash transfer is optimal when the utility redistribution is either 'sufficiently' small or large; (ii) if and only if both the equality-of-opportunity concern and the utility redistribution are large enough, can an in-kind program which attracts the whole population be justified; (iii) even when everybody chooses the in-kind program, it may be optimal to perform some additional utility redistribution by increasing the size of such program. Author Affiliation: (a) Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS), Universidad National de La Plata, Argentina (b) West Virginia University, College of Business and Economics, Division of Economics, and Finance, 412 Business and Economics Building, P.O. Box 6025, Morgantown, WV 26506-6025, United States Article History: Received 26 February 2004; Revised 24 February 2005; Accepted 4 March 2005