One of the consequences of British rule in Ceylon was the gradual disintegration of the traditional social order with its structure of authority and influence. In the traditional social system, power and prestige were derived from caste and kinship. The caste system restricted the life chances of individuals to very narrow limits, and the authority of the traditional elite, comprising of 'high caste' royal officials, was theoretically inviolable. But British rule changed all this. The administrative and economic changes introduced in the 19th century, together with English education, offered the individual new avenues for social advancement. Since English was the language of administration, proficiency in English became indispensible for government employment. The English educated 'colonial elite' of government servants (and in the course of time, professional men) acted as intermediaries between the small cadre of British officials who represented the raj in Ceylon and the masses. This new elite who owed their social position mainly to western education, came to eclipse in power and prestige the old nobility. This process of change in native leadership developed gradually but steadily in the 19th century and by the turn of this century the western educated community had emerged as an important element of Ceylonese society. This study shows their development in the period, 1910-1931, primarily, in terms of their growing involvement in public life and the increasing access to political power. In 1910 the western educated had little political influence, but they were considered sufficiently important and distinct to be given separate representation in the Legislative Council. After 1931, with universal franchise, the masses also participated in political activity. But the years in between saw the political scene dominated almost exclusively by the new elite. This period was chosen for study because it was in these two decades that the western educated elite developed into a position of undisputed leadership in the Ceylonese community.

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The research carried out looks at the interaction within and between four independent variables: Social Class, Organisation in which the subjects worked, Sex and Unconscious Sexual Identity of husbands and wives of stable families. These variables are related to Work, Spouses and Children. The 12 dependent variables are the dimensions which seem the most relevant to coding the individual's identity or subjective character. They are Affiliation, Aggression, Autonomy, Dominance, Identification, Nurturance, Responsibility, Security, Self-Confidence, Sharing and Succourance. Forty couples are divided into four groups: Male/female; Middle-class/Working-class; entrepreneurial/bureaucratic; masculine/feminine. Data collection includes a projective-semi-structured questionnaire, an unstructured test requiring subjects-to draw and a demographic questionnaire. The results reveal that husbands have significantly higher scores than wives on Achievement, Dominance, Responsibility and Security, and significantly lower scores oil Autonomy, Identification, Nurturance and Self-Confidence. Subjects in the Middle class make significantly more references than those in the working class to Achievement, Autonomy, Dominance, Identification, Self-Confidence and Sharing, and significantly less references to Affiliation, Aggression and Security. Entrepreneurs have significantly higher scores than bureaucrats on Achievement, Autonomy, Dominance, Responsibility and Self-Confidence and significantly lower scores on Affiliation, Security, Nurturance and Succourance. Subjects who come within the masculine range as measured by the Franck Test, make significantly more references than those who come within the feminine range to Aggression and Dominance, and significantly less references to Affiliation, Nurturance, Self-Confidence, Sharing and Succourance. There is a significant inter-action between Social Class and Organisation on Aggression, Autonomy, Dominance, Nurturance, Self-Confidence and Sharing. There is significant interaction between Sex and Unconscious Sexual Identity on Affiliation, Aggression, Autonomy, Identification and Self-Confidence. There is also a significant interaction between Sex and Social Class on Achievement, Aggression and Security.

This thesis examines marginality as a regime of interconnectedness. Drawing on the ethnographic material from a 16-month-fieldwork between October 2009 and December 2010 on the street economy and streetlife in Arada, the old city centre of Addis Ababa’s inner city, I argue that marginalized subjects are not to be seen as social actors that inhabit and create alternative and parallel social, political and economic realities away from the mainstream society. Rather, the way the urban poor are connected and integrated in the broader political economy of the Ethiopian urban society frames and defines modalities, forms and experiences of marginality. From this perspective, this thesis focuses on the on-going reconfiguration of the street economy in Addis Ababa’s inner city. Since the early 2000s, the increasing concern with poverty reduction and good governance in the development agenda has concurred with the attempts of the ruling party to expand its machinery of political control and mobilization at the grassroots of urban society. In this context, under the impact of development programs promoting the establishment of small-scale enterprises, the street economy has undergone a pervasive process of formalization and politicization that has come to advance the realization of an authoritarian form of developmental state, while imposing a regime of unskilled and badly paid labour on the street. This thesis examines this process by looking at the history of streetlife in Arada, as a terrain of social, economic and political practice, and it recounts the everyday life and life trajectories of those involved in the street economy. In particular, I look at how the political reconfiguration of the street economy has come to intertwine with the way living through marginality and dealing with forms of social inequality on the street have been historically conceptualized and experienced in Addis Ababa’s inner city.

The Bolsa Família (BF) is considered to be a well-targeted cash transfer programme for poor families, with benefits conditional on meeting health and educational requirements. Extreme poverty in Brazil is concentrated in rural areas, and is highest among those who rely on agriculture in historically underprivileged areas of the semiarid interior. Although there is no comprehensive study of chronic poverty in Brazil due to lack of longitudinal datasets, one can infer that, the more remote small, poor rural municipalities are, the higher is the probability of persistent and severe poverty. Therefore, it is questionable whether the BF, with conditionalities attached to frequently limited services, is the most appropriate social protection policy for reaching the working-age able-bodied rural poor living in isolated areas. I identified the rural poor in remote and non-remote municipalities using geographical information systems. In this thesis, through four pieces of analytical work, I thus investigate how effectively the BF programme reaches the persistently poor in remote and non-remote rural municipalities. First, I used quantitative methods to investigate whether BF participation rates are higher in poor remote rural municipalities. Second, based on a qualitative analysis of eight interviews at the federal administration level, I investigated the question of whether the policy design and national implementation considered how to reach the persistently poor in remote rural areas. Third, I examined how local administration ensured that the persistently poor were given priority in the implementation. I conducted 14 interviews in four case studies, two in remote and two in non-remote poor rural municipalities. Lastly, I analysed how the rural poor took up benefits with 22 household interviews in rural villages. This thesis concludes that, despite the BF’s cost-efficiency, it does not effectively address the needs of the persistently poor living in remote rural municipalities, where services are non-existent, difficult to access, and of low quality.

This thesis consists of three essays on intragenerational and intergenerational inequality. It focuses on the largest developing country, China, and examines historically and currently under-represented groups. The first chapter, “Does Adversity Affect Long-term Consumption and Financial Behaviour? Evidence from China’s Rustication Programme”, investigates the longterm effects of early experiences on economic behaviour, by referring to the largest forced migration experiment in history. Focusing on the historically under-represented group of people who were sent from urban to rural areas to do manual farm work during their adolescence, I demonstrate that they behave conservatively over the long term. They spend less on housing, accumulate more savings and insurance, and invest less in risky assets. One mechanism for the conservative behaviour lies in the habits formed during adversity. My study sheds light on how a policy, experienced especially in the early stage of life, influences a generation over the long term. In addition to inequality, the second and the third chapters examine intergenerational mobility. The second chapter, “The Great Gatsby Curve in China: Cross-Sectional Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility”, estimates the extent of the decline in intergenerational mobility in income and education during China’s economic transition. The decline is more evident for the currently under-represented groups: females, and residents of rural areas and the western regions. To correlate intergenerational mobility with cross-sectional inequality, a Great Gatsby Curve with a negative slope is presented, and related institutional factors are discussed. This chapter is written jointly with Junjian Yi and Junsen Zhang. The third chapter, “Intergenerational Income Persistence and Transmission through Identity: Evidence from Urban China”, investigates the mechanism of the decreasing intergenerational mobility in income during China’s transition. I demonstrate a shift in the leading contributor to the intergenerational income persistence conditional on income group and age cohort. Specifically, education is a leading contributor for all families before the market reform, and for households with below-average income in the post-reform era. However, a new transmission channel, political identity, plays a leading role in households with above-average income in the post-reform era. It sheds light on the necessity of intensifying reform in contemporary China.

Based on anthropological fieldwork in factories in China’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs), this dissertation examines the process of ‘growing up’ and ‘becoming independent’ for young migrant workers from the countryside, especially in relation to their decisions about employment and marriage. In ‘post-socialist’ China, as many writers have observed, the old systems and ideas have not entirely faded away but new market logics have been imposed on them. Partly as a result of this, the process of achieving adulthood – i.e. the process through which young people should, in theory, learn how to position themselves as full members of society – is now filled with uncertainties. Old expectations about interactions with others have become invalid. This is especially so for young migrant workers from the countryside who, as I argue, possess a double social being, i.e. they are caught somewhere between childhood and adulthood, and who face the challenges of multilocality, i.e. they shift back and forth between rural and urban environments. For them, migration is a mandatory rite of passage, but one that often leaves them suspended in a position of liminality and uncertainty. The research found that young workers learn, in the course of migration, that manipulating personal networks is the most efficient way for them to get the resources they need – so that they can deal with the problems of uncertainty they face. They rely on the rather traditional mode of ‘interconnected personhood’, instead of developing what might be called ‘individualistic personhood’. Having said this, they are meanwhile enjoying the freedom, opportunities and symbolic values that individualistic personhood can bring them. They stand in between the two systems and typically avoid fully committing to one or the other. This is how they deal with risks and responsibilities within the constraints imposed by their background, gender, and class position.

This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters. Chapter 1 develops a two-sector, bivariate matching model, in which each sector uses a different dimension of skill in the production process. I show there exists a unique assignment of agents to sectors and derive comparative statics. The main result is that if jobs are scarce, both an increase in sector one skills' spread and a technological improvement increase the supply of talent in sector one, but decrease it in sector two. In sector two, this raises wages and wage inequality. In sector one, the effects are ambiguous in general, but wages increase for the most and decrease for the least talented agents. Chapter 2 studies the impact of social status on occupational sorting in a two-sector matching framework. Talent is two-dimensional and thus status is not a zero-sum game; it depends both on occupational prestige and within-sector rank (local status). I show that the weights with which these two components enter - the structure of status - crucially influence the way in which agents self-select into sectors and argue that it is likely that these weights differ across occupations. The more important are the individual components of status in a sector, or the less important the collective component, the better the agents who join that industry, which has important implications for total payoffs, wage levels and inequality, and profits. I also show that the stable assignment is typically inefficient, which is driven by the distortion of relative status rewards, not status concerns per se. Chapter 3 investigates whether directors of companies should have limited liability. I develop a three-player model in which: (a) debtholders and equityholders are defined by their control rights and (b) the project is run by the directors. The main result is that increased liability for directors forces them to internalise more of the downside risk of the project and hence reduces their risk-taking. This is optimal if over-investment was a problem initially. I show that the extent to which over-investment is a problem depends on how well debtholders are protected compared to equityholders. If debtholders are strong, increased liability can cause under-investment.

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This thesis is formed of three chapters. The first chapter examines the effect on social mobility and economic growth following the introduction of reprogenetic technology such that parents can choose to invest in the talent or ability of their unborn children. I find that if the economy is initially in a steady state such that social mobility is low, the introduction of such technology can increase social mobility and economic growth. If the economy is initially in a steady state such that social mobility is high, then the introduction of such technology will not increase (and may decrease) social mobility and will not affect economic growth. The second chapter is a review of the literature on how immigration affects wages focusing on studies of the US and UK labour markets. The third chapter analyses how the skill premium depends on the relative supply of high and low skilled workers in the economy, and the size of the economy. Using a two-sector model where one sector is more skill-intensive than the other, and returns to scale are larger in the skill-intensive sector, I find that the skill premium depends positively on the size of the economy. I consider the effect of an exogenous increase in the number of skilled workers (perhaps due to immigration) on the skill premium and find that under certain conditions the skill premium may increase. I then analyse the effect on the skill premium and the relative price of the skill intensive good in the short and long run and compare the models predictions to the data.