Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Rising economic inequality has become a widespread trend and concern in recent decades. Economic inequality is often associated with pernicious consequences such as a decrease in individual health and social cohesion and an increase in political conflicts. Does economic inequality have a negative association with prosocial behavior, like many other aspects of inequality? To answer this question, this dissertation investigates the relationship between economic inequality and prosocial behavior, particularly charitable giving, by conducting three empirical studies. The first study is a meta-analysis on the overall relationship between economic inequality and prosocial behavior. Results from 192 effect sizes in 100 studies show that there is a general small, negative relationship between economic inequality and different forms of prosocial behavior. Moderator tests demonstrate that social context, the operationalization of prosocial behavior, the operationalization of economic inequality, and average age of participants significantly moderate the relationship between economic inequality and prosocial behavior. The second study differentiates between redistributive and non-redistributive charitable causes and examines how income inequality is associated with charitable giving to these two causes in China. Using synthesized data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS) and official data, this study shows that income inequality has no significant relationship with charitable giving to redistributive causes, but it has a negative association with charitable giving to non-redistributive causes. Of the four moderators, only education significantly moderates the relationship between income inequality and redistributive giving. The third study tests whether and how government social spending mediates the relationship between income inequality and charitable giving. Using the US county level panel data, this study finds there is no significant relationship between income inequality and government social spending as well as between government social spending and charitable giving. Thus, government social spending does not significantly mediate the relationship between income inequality and charitable giving. However, income inequality has a robustly and significantly negative relationship with charitable giving. In sum, this dissertation furthers our understanding of the relationship between economic inequality and prosocial behavior, especially charitable giving. Given the higher economic inequality facing many countries, it is a timely dissertation and has important practical implications.

This paper empirically examines the effect of income inequality on economic growth in a sample of 69 high income economies. It uses an improved inequality dataset developed by the World Institute for Development Economics Research and panel estimation techniques in an ordinary least squares regression. The results provide robust empirical evidence that rising levels of income inequality have adverse effects on growth in high income countries and indicate that, on average, a one standard deviation increase in income inequality will decrease growth by 67.91%. Results from the regression also suggest increases in human capital and international openness, decreases in the government consumption ratio, and more favorable terms of trade promote growth while higher initial per capita GDP and higher levels of investment retard growth.

Segregation has many negative consequences for marginalized populations, including poor health, increased poverty, low-quality housing, and limited education and employment opportunities. Scholars have recently recognized access to food as another piece of this “advanced marginality.” This study illuminates how lagging food and transportation infrastructures exacerbates these interlocking inequalities and whether new ride-hail technologies' promise that ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft will help affected populations access food stores with lower prices and higher food quality. As a descriptive understanding of the intersection between food, transportation, and racial residential segregation in Chicago, Illinois, this study analyzes two questions: (1) how often are ride-hail trips crossing food desert census tract boundaries; and (2) are ride-hail trips that cross food desert census tract boundaries accessing food stores? Using spatial analyses of the City of Chicago’s ride-hail transportation data, food store location data, American Community Survey data, and USDA food desert classification data, this study finds that ride-hail services are accessing food desert neighborhoods, but they are doing so at a very low rate, and very few ride-hail rides are used to access food stores after departing from food desert neighborhoods.

This dissertation examines racial inequality and affirmative action in Malaysia and South Africa, two countries with a politically dominant but economically disadvantaged majority group - the Bumiputera in Malaysia, and blacks in post-Apartheid South Africa. We aim to contribute comparative perspectives and current empirical research on affirmative action regimes and dimensions of inequality directly pertinent to affirmative action, chiefly, racial representation and earnings inequality among tertiary educated workers and in upper-level occupations. We discuss theoretical approaches to inequality and affirmative action, with attention to particular circumstances of majority-favoring regimes, then survey, compare and contrast affirmative action programs and their political economic context in Malaysia and South Africa. In the empirical portions, we outline patterns and evaluate determinants of racial inequality, focusing on the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. On Malaysia, we find that Bumiputera access to tertiary education has rapidly increased, but also observe disproportionate difficulties among Bumiputera degree-holders in participating in labor markets and in attaining upper-level occupations. Bumiputera representation at managerial and professional levels has remained static and dependent on the public sector. Econometric results indicate that quality of tertiary education impacts on the prospect of attaining upper-level jobs, and that Bumiputera are more adversely affected. Lack of data restricts our assessment of racial earnings inequality to a deduction that Bumiputera young graduates have experienced relatively greater decline in their earnings capacity. On South Africa, we find that blacks have steadily increased access to tertiary education, although disparities in quality of institutions and in student performance persist, which disproportionately and negatively affect black graduates. We observe that black representation has increased in upper-level, especially professional, occupations, largely in the public sector. We find that white-black earnings disparity declined substantially among degree-qualified workers, while not diminishing or not showing clear patterns among other educational and occupational groups. We conclude by considering, within the constraints of each country's political economic context, implications that arise from our findings. Most saliently, while affirmative action raises quantitative attainment of tertiary education and representation in upper-level occupations for the beneficiary group, inadequate attention to qualitative development of institutions and progressive distribution of benefits may attenuate progress toward the ultimate objective of cultivating broad-based, self-reliant professionals and managers.

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<p dir="ltr">Do local religious contexts impact people’s attitudes about race inequality in society? In this dissertation, I examine this question using data from the General Social Survey and multilevel modeling. I define religious context as the local population percentage that are in particular denominational groups (evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Black Protestants, and Catholics); the percentage that are in groupings which cross-cut denominational affiliation (religious liberal, religious moderate, and religious conservative); and the percentage that are religiously unaffiliated. The racial attitudes I examine are what a person attributes to be the root cause of Black-White income inequality in the US—individualistic explanations (a lack of will or in-born differences between the races) or structural explanations (a lack of access to education or discrimination).</p><p dir="ltr">This dissertation sits at the intersection of three bodies of literature: (1) the impact of local religious context on sociological variables, (2) the impact of religion on social attitudes about race inequality at the individual level, and (3) the impact of contextual level factors (that are not religious in nature) on social attitudes about race inequality at the individual level. The theoretical foundation for this research is a theory of religious subcultural influence which outlines how the presence of more people from a religious tradition creates a local religious subculture which can impact the local public subculture which can impact the attitudes and behaviors of individuals in the area.</p><p dir="ltr">Results from the analyses presented in this project indicate that while personal religious affiliation at the individual level is influential on these attitudes, the influence of the religious context around a person is more mixed. For some explanations of racial inequality, namely a lack of will or a lack of education, the religious contexts surrounding a person have some moderate influences. Stepwise regression analyses reveal that some other contextual variables, such as the region of the country in which the respondent resides or the local concentration of immigrants, have stronger influences on these attitudes.</p><p dir="ltr">Further analysis examines if these effects of religious context extend to all people in a geographic area, not only the focal religious group’s own people. Findings from this analysis show that, for the most part, where there are religious context effects, the effect extends to all residents of an area. In a few cases, however, there are only self-reinforcing effects (where a group is only influential on themselves) or possible reactionary effects (where there is an effect on the non-members, but it is likely not due to transmission from the religious context group).</p><p dir="ltr">Other explorations in this dissertation look for threshold, ceiling, or floor effects in the effects of religious context. This analysis shows that most of the detected effects of religious contexts are linear, and the group does not need to be a certain size before it can be influential. In a few cases, the effect of the religious context reaches a floor or ceiling limit meaning the effect of the religious context eventually levels off and does not exert any more influence. Additional analyses also look at the role of the respondent’s racial identity, how ideological differences between Hispanic Catholics and non-Hispanic Catholics may be present, if the effects of religious context are stronger now than in previous decades, and if biblical literalism is responsible for some of the influences of religious context detected.</p><p dir="ltr">Taken together, all of the analyses in this dissertation illustrate that there are some important, albeit mild, influences of local religious context on a person’s racial attitudes. These findings also show that religious context intersects with region in noteworthy and complex ways.</p>

The female education is said to be a vehicle that break the shackes of poverty thereby leading to transformation,development and progress.

Since the 1950s, Haitian transnational migrants have ensured the socioeconomic survival of many nonmigrants in Haiti by sending billions of US dollars annually to their families and friends back home. While Haitian migrants are often perceived as having a positive economic impact on Haiti, some are criticized for engaging in homosexual behaviours, seemingly infringing on ‘traditional’ Haitian family values in a largely conservative ‘Christian’ society. This revives old debates about migrants’ role in using their money to normalize same-sex identity and practices and pervert sexual morality and ‘acceptable’ gender norms among nonmigrants in Haiti. Accordingly, men in Haiti are involved in same-sex intimate transnational relationships with migrants from the Haitian diaspora because of their precarious socioeconomic status in Haiti and not necessarily because they may be gay. Although homosexuality has always existed in Haiti and same-sex intimate relationships among men in Haiti and those abroad have long existed, these relationships have rarely been studied in the literature on transnational migration and sexualities. To fill this gap, this thesis draws on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork and forty-four semi-structured interviews with men in Northern Haiti to show how homosexuality intersects with transnational space and socioeconomic inequality to shape and organize transnational processes and same-sex intimate relationships involving men in Haiti and their migrant partners across the Haitian diaspora in the United States, Canada, France, Brazil, Chile, and the Dominican Republic. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In 2022, the World Bank estimated that international migrants sent 647 billion US dollars to their families, kinships, and friendship networks worldwide. This significant flow of money exemplifies the cross-border ties, connections, and relationships that people who moved from their homelands to resettle in host countries maintain with those who have stayed behind in their home communities. While scholars have conducted significant research in the past four decades on how international migrants’ gender, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, country of origin and host countries’ reception contexts shape how they maintain such ties, connections, and relationships with their homelands, there is a dearth of research on how the sexuality of LGBTQ+ migrants and nonmigrants shapes how they develop and maintain connections, ties, and relationships that span national borders. To fill this gap, this thesis uses a Haitian case study to examine how migrant and nonmigrant men develop and sustain same-sex intimate relationships across national borders and what they mean to them in their home country’s socioeconomic and political contexts.

Sweden has long been lauded for its efforts to promote equality since the 1970s, but there is still work to be done in terms of gender equality in the labor market. Specifically, the Swedish labor market exhibits horizontal gender segregation, with men and women working in professions that are often gender-coded. To shed light on this issue, a study was conducted to examine vocational teachers' experiences with gender equality. The study draws on Connell's concept of gender order and gender regime, as well as the Swedish state's definition of gender equality (Jämställdhet). Results show that experiences with gender equality are varied, with shortcomings within the teaching profession and school organization making it difficult for teachers to uphold the core values of a “jämställd” education. Interestingly, the study also found differences between non-authorized and authorized vocational teachers, with the latter group identifying greater inequality issues within education and taking more active steps to promote gender equality in their classrooms.