The <i>Hukou</i> system has been a basic institution in Chinese society for several decades. My thesis explores whether, after nearly 30 years of reform and opening up in China, this system still plays a role in individuals lives and if so, what is this role? This study uses qualitative data from policy documents and quantitative data from the China General Social Survey 2003 to examine differences in income and access to welfare services among rural and urban <i>Hukou</i> holders and in <i>Hukou</i> status conversion both before and since the reform era and point out that the <i>Hukou</i> system contributes to inequality in individuals life chances in two dimensions: resource allocation and <i>Hukou</i> status conversion. The findings show that urban residents are advantaged in resource allocation before and in the reform era; the control mechanism of quota and policy for <i>Hukou</i> status conversion from rural to urban in the pre-reform era was replaced by the locally defined but nationally enforced entry conditions or requirements in reform era. The talented people, the CCP members, the people who have permanent jobs in urban areas, and the people whose family members hold urban Hukou are more likely now to overcome the <i>Hukou</i>-based control. The <i>Hukou</i>-based migration control continues on a localized basis and excludes the majority of rural residents from access to the rights enjoyed by urban residents. The findings of this thesis indicate that the consequences of the Hukou system continue today and additional reform still needs to be introduced.

The object of this thesis was to deepen the understanding of the contemporary political discourse regarding migrant women exposed to domestic violence. This was conducted by analysing propositions, motions and interpellation debates raising the issue during the years 2000-2012. The method used was inspired by Foucault’s discourse analysis and the traditional hermeneutic approach. The result showed how several different mechanisms work to both include and exclude these women from the Swedish welfare system. By being women they are included in the political debate regarding men’s violence against women, but their migrant status excludes them from it at the same time. When migrant women are exposed to domestic violence it is often seen as an individual problem even though men’s violence against women generally is seen as a structural problem. Several conflicts of interests were also found. One of them being whether migrant women are to be warned if their partners have abused women before. The man’s right to integrity stands against the woman’s right to protection. Another conflict is the fear of the migration right being abused, which is pitted against the migrant women’s rights. To summarize the analysis this thesis has shown how the portraying of migrant women as different in the political discourse plays an important role in creating conflicts of interest and to some extent exclude them from the welfare system. Women’s right seem to apply only to certain women under certain circumstances. An intersectional perspective was necessary for understanding the complexity of the situation, taking into account how different power relations interact and construct the contemporary discourse.

This paper investigates the impact of income inequality on grand total crime, larceny and violent crime by using the dynamic panel data of 20 cities and counties in Taiwan during 1998 to 2010. The empirical results show that income inequality has a significant positive impact on grand total crime, larceny and violent crime, but unemployment rate and the proportion of the population between 15 and 64 years old both have no significant influence on three kinds of crimes. Moreover the effect of the other explanatory variables is significant on at least one kind of crimes. The empirical results also support that the criminal expected utility theory, social anomic, disorganization, conflict and strain theories are helpful to explain the criminal behavior of Taiwan.

The impact of Community - on health is one of the core issues of sociology and social epidemiology. Dengue fever, whose occurrence and eradication highly depend in the environment of the community, provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between the community and the health. This study focuses on the outbreak of Dengue fever in 2006 in Kaohsiung City and analyzes how community factors affect the cluster infections of. This study uses the theories of social capital and social vulnerability to explore the effect population, socioeconomic status, and public participation in the community on cluster infection. Social capital is formed by community members through participating in public affairs and voluntary organizations; social vulnerability refers to the overall socio-economic conditions that shape the ability of community to respond to the undesirable events. The social capital index was constructed composed of the Community Development Association, the voting rate of warden elections. Social vulnerability index is based on the compositions of the population, including the proportion of elderly males, population change rate, ratio of low-income households the proportion of dependents than average household income. In addition to consideration the spatial characteristics of dengue fever, this thesis uses Moran's I and LISA test dengue fever outbreaks, and correct the result by Geographically Weighted Regression. The results shows the impact of community factors on the health of residents, provide health sociology and control of dengue fever different reflections direction.

This research project examines variations in inequality in individual earned incomes across U.S. metropolitan areas. The main analysis includes thirteen explanatory variables from three major perspectives - the political economy perspective, the demand-side perspective and the labor force supply-side perspective. In addition, I applied path models to explain causalities between some independent variables and used the decomposition of the Theil index to show the between-group effects. The results indicate that most demand-side and supply-side factors significantly contribute to variances in metropolitan income inequalities, while the impact of political economic factors are very limited. The paper is organized in the following manner: Chapter I is the introduction; Chapter II reviews literature focusing on the level of earning inequality and its predictors; Chapter III describes data and measures of variables; Chapter IV introduces statistical methods (including OLS regression model, path analysis, and decomposition of the Theil index); Chapter V presents the results of OLS regression model and its explanations; Chapter VI explains path analysis and decomposition analysis and their results; and finally, Chapter VII discusses the current research project and its implications for future studies.

This dissertation includes three studies, devoted to trying to understand inequality in health between people from different social groups in a democratic society. In the U.S., social inequality in health takes various forms and the key to understanding how democracy solves the problem of inequality lies in a complex set of political and social factors. I take an institutional approach and focus on examining how political and policy institutions, their administrative processes, and the policy implementation environment are linked to social inequality in health. The first essay, Whose Baby Matters More, uses a theoretical framework for evaluating heterogeneous group responses to public health policies and depicts how racial disparities in health are rooted in group heterogeneity in policy responses. The second essay, Anxious Girls and Inactive Boys, focuses on how state-level policy interventions and social capital interactively affect gender differences in health. The third essay, Responsibility for Equity, explores the link between publicness of state healthcare systems and social equity in healthcare access. In the first essay, I focus on racial disparities in infant mortality rates and pool state-level data from 1990 to 2006. The empirical analysis suggests that enhancing the capacity of state healthcare systems is critical to improving population health. Blacks and whites, nevertheless, exhibit different responses to the same policy. Racial disparities could be reduced only when policy interventions generate more relative benefits for Blacks. In the second essay, I find that social capital conditions the effect of public health policies with regard to managing childhood obesity. There are gender differences, moreover, in health outcomes and behavioral responses to state and local-level obesity policies. In the third essay, I find that different institutional factors exhibit different impact on inequality in healthcare access. While public finance resources may reduce inequality in healthcare access, public ownership and the public healthcare workforce do not have significant association with inequality in healthcare access. State Medicaid eligibility rules exhibit moderate impact on inequality in healthcare access.

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Classical partitioning problems, like the Max-Cut problem, ask for partitions that optimize one quantity, which are important to such fields as VLSI design, combinatorial optimization, and computer science. Judicious partitioning problems on graphs or hypergraphs ask for partitions that optimize several quantities simultaneously. In this dissertation, we work on judicious partitions of graphs and hypergraphs, and solve or asymptotically solve several open problems of Bollobas and Scott on judicious partitions, using the probabilistic method and extremal techniques.

This thesis investigates spatial patterns of income-based residential segregation at the neighborhood level in the Russian capital city Moscow within new administrative boundaries, which have received relatively little attention in prior studies. It is argued that Moscow faces high levels of income inequality exacerbated by growing levels of spatial segregation between the affluent and prestigious Center – South-West and poor industrial South – South-East. Applying a whole set of quantitative methods complemented with computer mapping techniques, based on the latest 2013 data by the City of Moscow Territorial Branch of the Federal State Statistics and 2010 Census data, this study provides new insights into spatial differentiation processes and elaborates policy solutions aimed at addressing economic disparities in the city. A key finding of this thesis is that income segregation in the study area has been driven to a larger extent by the isolation of very poor neighborhoods from middle- and upper-income areas.

Billions of dollars in development aid are sent to developing countries every year. Weak institutions in recipient countries are the main impediments often discussed to prevent aid from reaching the intended targets. At the same time, they also hinder aid effectiveness in improving the lives of the people. This dissertation argues that the impact of aid on income distribution and human welfare in recipient countries differs by their institutional quality. Institutions encompass many different dimensions. This dissertation focuses on: corruption in government, quality of bureaucracy, and the rule of law. This study explores the impact in two essays. The first essay investigates the role of institutions in aid distribution. In particular, we examine the interplay between aid and institutions on income shares of different population groups (measured by income quintiles), and on the gap between the rich and the poor (measured by the Gini coefficient). The study uses Principal Component Analysis to construct an institutional index from the three components: corruption, bureaucratic quality, and the rule of law. Employing Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) methodology on a panel data of 85 countries from 1960 to 2004, this study finds that an increase in aid as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decreases the income shares of the poor (quintile 1 and quintile 2), but increases that of the rich (quintile 5), thereby widening the gap between the rich and the poor (Gini coefficient). Contrary to our main hypothesis, though, recipient countries’ institutions do not play any role in aid distribution. Similarly, the second essay also focuses on the importance of recipient institutions, but it assesses aid effectiveness in improving human welfare. The study considers five human development indicators: the Human Development Index (HDI), the health index, the infant mortality rate, the education index, and the average years of schooling. The study empirically tests the hypothesis by utilizing the same methodology as in the first essay, but on a panel of 80 countries from 1980 to 2004. The findings suggest that human welfare in recipient countries improves as aid increases. The improvement appears to be driven more by the health than the education sector. Furthermore, aid is more effective in countries with poorer institutional quality, which is contrary to the hypothesis. However, the results are not consistent when taking into account government’s pro-poor public expenditure.