Essays on Decomposing Economic Inequality PDF Download

Author: David Gallusser
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Rushde Elahi Akbar
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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In this dissertation I analyze the effect of globalization on income inequality and aggregate productivity growth. In the first two chapters I develop a theoretical model to study the effect of international trade and foreign direct investments (FDI) on income inequality. In the model firms with heterogeneous productivity levels hire homogenous workers. The central feature of the model is the rent-sharing mechanism, by which firms share part of their profits with employees. As a result, income varies across workers because more productive firms pay more to their workers. In the first chapter, I focus on the case when all countries are symmetric in their aggregate productivity levels. I find that increased openness to trade increases welfare and at the same time reduces income inequality. At the same time, policies that facilitate FDI, although increase welfare, also lead to greater inequality. I also find that technological progress can result in higher inequality. In the second chapter I extend the model to asymmetric countries, in which one country (North) has greater aggregate productivity than the other country (South). As the two countries liberalize trade, both countries would observe a reduction in inequality, although the reduction is greater in the North and the income inequality differential between the two countries decreases. A unilateral tariff reduction by the South has a similar effect, but North is better off setting lower tariff as it observes lowest inequality compare to other cases. The third chapter analyzes aggregate productivity growth in Chilean manufacturing industry during 1979-96. I first decompose the aggregate growth into three major components: the inter-industry effect, whereby aggregate productivity increases due to expansion of the most productive industries; the intra-industry effect, whereby aggregate productivity increase due to expansion of the most productive firms within an industry; the technological effect, which reflects a symmetric increase in aggregate productivity across all firms and industries. I then estimate the contribution of each of these channels to Chilean aggregate productivity growth and find that technological progress was the major factor of the rapid aggregate productivity growth in Chile, while the contribution of inter-industry and intra-industry effects was minimal.

Author: Alain de Janvry
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387297480
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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This collection of essays honors a remarkable man and his work. Erik Thorbecke has made significant contributions to the microeconomic and the macroeconomic analysis of poverty, inequality and development, ranging from theory to empirics and policy. The essays in this volume display the same range. As a collection they make the fundamental point that deep understanding of these phenomena requires both the micro and the macro perspectives together, utilizing the strengths of each but also the special insights that come when the two are linked together. After an overview section which contains the introductory chapter and a chapter examining the historical roots of Erik Thorbecke's motivations, the essays in this volume are grouped into four parts, each part identifying a major strand of Erik's work—Measurement of Poverty and Inequality, Micro Behavior and Market Failure, SAMs and CGEs, and Institutions and Development. The range of topics covered in the essays, written by leading authorities in their own areas, highlight the extraordinary depth and breadth of Erik Thorbecke's influence in research and policy on poverty, inequality and development. Acknowledgements These papers were presented at a conference in honor of Erik Thorbecke held at Cornell University on October 10-11, 2003. The conference was supported by the funds of the H. E. Babcock Chair in Food, Nutrition and Public Policy, and the T. H. Lee Chair in World Affairs at Cornell University.

Author: Jean Chrysostome Ngabitsinze
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Francisco Alberto Castellanos Sosa
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation studies income inequality in the United States during the last two decades. The connections income inequality has with other topics and its measurement features allow for its exploration from different perspectives, giving origin to the overarching objective of this dissertation. To examine contemporaneous U.S. income inequality under two of the three stands it might take in any research process: a phenomenon itself and a dependent (outcome) variable. Therefore, the chapters in this dissertation position income inequality under a different spotlight, using a wide array of quantitative methodologies. Income inequality is first considered a phenomenon and disaggregated under Liao's (2016) decomposition at an in-vogue geographical level: Commuting Zones. Such decomposition helps identify the within-share element from a commonly shared income range across all local labor markets and the within-differentiation arising from the differences across the income distributions. Then, it is possible to identify the degree to which the within, between, within-share, and within-differentiations inequality dynamics drive its overall increasing pattern. This approach identifies, through the between component, those local labor markets exerting the most influence in the overall measure. The second perspective considers income inequality as a dependent variable throughout the study of income effects at different parts of its distribution and directly on traditional measures. In doing so, the quasi-random staggered implementation of the Secure Communities program (hereon referred to as SC) is exploited. SC is, in a few words, a federal program to strengthen immigration enforcement efforts across different levels of government agencies. Short-term effects of SC on income inequality are obtained using the improved doubly robust difference-in-differences (DiD) estimator weighted for multiple treatment periods (DRIMP) proposed by Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021). Effects in overall wages, by gender and main education groups, by income deciles, and by traditional inequality measures are estimated

Author: Seunghee Lee (Economist)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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As the interest in Economics on inequality has exploded, intergenerational mobility is one of the fundamental areas concerning inequality since it is related to many normative questions such as equal opportunity and fairness. Despite its importance, research on measuring intergenerational mobility has received relatively little attention. The dominant approach is still the scalar-based regression approach, which employs a regression of some statistics of offspring on some statistics of parents. In connection with this issue, this dissertation introduces a novel measure for intergenerational mobility based on modern economic theory and empirically analyzes intergenerational mobility in the U.S. and Korea.The first chapter analyzes the empirical aspect of the relationship between parental income trajectory and a child's success in the U.S. using a novel approach, functional approach.In particular, we find that parental income when their children are in their late teens is more correlated with children's income in their early 30s. In addition, children whose parental income tends to increase in their late teens are more likely to have a higher economic position than their parents. This implies that upward income mobility is positively associated with the steadily increasing economic status of the family over the first 20 years of children's life. Investigated further are the effects on explaining a child's success of the role of other trajectories, such as the family structure of unemployment and job type of household head, and the impact of parental education level. We also investigate the association between parental income profile and their children's college attendance and derive a similar finding that late teens are crucial periods when parents' income has a more significant impact on children's educational success.While the first chapter addresses issues in intergenerational mobility in the U.S., the second chapter focuses on intergenerational mobility in Korea. In the second chapter, using a similar approach to Chapter 1, we analyze the intergenerational mobility in all three dimensions - income, education, and occupation. In addition, reflecting Korea's unique historical and social characteristics, we study the association between investment in private tutoring and a child's economic and educational success. Our findings highlight the importance of parental intervention in teens on a child's educational success. The pattern of parental income profile of the upward mobility group shows a stronger upward trend than that of the downward mobility group, similar to what we observe in the U.S. data in Chapter 1. In Korea, both upward and downward mobility groups show steadily increasing parental income trajectories, reflecting the rapid economic growth Korea has experienced over the last six decades. This interesting and unique finding of mobility patterns in Korea reveals various social and economic structural changes Korea has gone through.The third chapter studies the various methodological issues. In this chapter, we consider how our functional estimate can be varied by the fluctuation of measurement error in parental income. Using Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, we decompose parental income into permanent and transitory components and consider the transitory component as a measurement error. We also compare our estimation method with the methods based on the fixed basis approach. Using too many bases in this approach yields nonsensical estimates, while the estimates using too few bases strongly depend on the shape of the basis. We also find that the fixed basis approach is not robust to measurement error. A possible endogeneity issue is also studied in this chapter. Parental income can affect their children's success through two channels, transmission of human capital and providing financial resources. To focus on the effect of financial resources, we measure intergenerational income mobility using instrumental variables to control the effect of human capital.

Author: Shatakshee Ramesh Dhongde
Publisher:
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Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Author: Yuyu Wang
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Author: Chengye Jia
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Studies of income inequality and intergenerational income mobility have important implications for policy. This dissertation consists of three essays which are contribute to the statistical inference on measures of intergenerational income mobility and the application of distributional decomposition to income inequality. The first two chapters propose semiparametric distribution regression estimators to study the transition matrices and local rank-rank slopes which are two measures of intergenerational income mobility. The third chapter extend the Oaxaca-Bliner decomposition to the distributions of income gap between two groups of people. The first chapter, INFERENCE ON COUNTERFACTUAL TRANSITION MATRICES, considers estimation and inference techniques for (i) conditional transition matrices -- transition matrices that are conditional on some vector of covariates, (ii) counterfactual transition matrices -- transition matrices that arise from holding fixed conditional transition matrices but adjusting the distribution of the covariates, and (iii) transition matrix average partial effects. Estimating conditional transition matrices is closely related to estimating conditional distribution functions, and we propose new semiparametric distribution regression estimators that may be of interest in other contexts as well. We also derive uniform inference results for transition matrices that allow researchers to account for issues such as multiple testing that naturally arise when estimating a transition matrix. We use our results to study differences in intergenerational mobility for black families and white families. In the application, we document large differences between the transition matrices of black and white families. We also show that these differences are partially, but not fully, explained by differences in the distributions of other family characteristics. The second chapter, SEMIPARAMETRIC ESTIMATION OF LOCAL RANK-RANK SLOPES, a local Rank-Rank slope which varies with parental rank and counterfactual Rank-Rank slope which adjusts for differences in the distribution of covariates. We develop new semiparametric distribution regression method to estimate those parameters. To make inference on different values of parental rank, we prove those estimators converge to Gaussian processes and build sup-t confidence bands by nonparametric bootstrap. In order to filter out some important observed characteristics, we sort the composition effects in an ascending order and propose classification analysis method, and also prove these converge to Gaussian processes. We apply our methods to study the differences in LRRS between cohort 79 and cohort 97. We show that the trend of LRRS of cohort 97 is very different from that of cohort 79 and find that children in cohort 97 which have larger composition effects are from higher income families, tend to be male and Nonblack and nonhispanic, and accept more years of education especially in advanced education. Also the difference in the parental education level after high school is unrelated to the composition effects across groups. The third chapter, DECOMPOSING WAGE GAPS BETWEEN HAN AND NON-HAN MINORITIES, uses CHIP 2013 dataset to analyze the income gap between two groups--Han and non-Han groups. Two methods are used in this paper to decompose the quantile differences of income among ethnic groups. One is distribution regression method proposed by y Chernozhukov, Fernández-Val, and Melly (2013) and the other is Recentered influence function regressions proposed by Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2018). There are three main results of this paper. First, after decomposing, the income gap is larger in the low quantile than in high quantile. Second, income gap can be partly explained by composition effects although the structure effect account for a larger part of the total gap than composition effect at each quantile. Finally, education, region and age account for most proportion of composition effects, which due to the fact that most non-Han families are living in the poor area and thus do not have enough money to support their education. Most ethnic minorities live in rural areas where the economy is underdeveloped.

Author: Charles Saharuk Mutsalklisana
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124949222
Category : Foreign workers
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Essay 2 finds that the result from DFL decomposition is consistent with the OB decomposition. We find that if Thai women possess similar observable characteristics as men, the gender wage inequality will be greater for the majority of the wage distribution, particularly, for middle to high income workers.