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Regional Development is a potentially powerful approach to help lower the inequality among Indian states. This study uses a robust control model for residuals analysis of infrastructure levels (rate of rural electrification and provision of all-weathered roads) to identify states that are over-performing and under-performing. The results show that a large disparity exists in providing adequate infrastructure among Indian states. While states such as, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are outdoing expectations, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are under-performing. A closer look at state policies adopted after the economic reforms, helped shed light on possible measures that under-performing states could adopt in order to improve standards of infrastructural development. Since infrastructure is closely related to overall economic development, adopting policies that are conducive to investments can help improve per capita income as well as the output of a state.

This paper updates the current knowledge about Black-White wage inequality in the US male labor market by using the NLSY97 sample. Compared with the results obtained from the NLSY79 cohort, I find that the unconditional racial wage inequality is smaller today, but after controlling for premarket academic skills, the conditional racial wage gap remains roughly the same as it was twenty years ago. After dividing the labor market by occupational categories, I find that in the white collar sector, the racial wage gap has largely disappeared even without controlling for academic skills. In the blue collar sector, academic skills can fully account for the unconditional racial wage gap among clerical jobs but there still remains a substantial conditional racial wage gap among craftsman and laborer jobs. I show that clerical jobs are more similar to white collar jobs than blue collar jobs today. The racial wage inequality also has disappeared among the operative workers, probably due to omitted variable bias. For the remaining racial wage gap in the craftsman and laborer jobs, both preference-based and statistical models of discrimination are consistent with the findings.

This dissertation focuses on the relationship between the education-based fertility gap and economic growth and on policy as a determinant of fertility. In the first essay I evaluate the impact of differential fertility (the difference between fertility rates of women with high educational attainment and women with low educational attainment) on economic growth by accounting for critical marginal effects and the general level of educational attainment in a given country. I also examine the possibility that this effect varies based on level of inequality and income levels. I find that for a less developed country with high income inequality, higher fertility rates of women with lower education has a favorable impact on economic development. In the second essay I examine the transmission and magnitude of the effect of differential fertility on economic growth at the subnational level. I explore the relationship between differential fertility and economic growth in a cross-U.S. state context. I find that a larger gap in fertility rates between highly-educated and less-educated women is strongly associated with a decrease in the rate of long-run economic growth across U.S. states, even after accounting for the levels of inequality and overall fertility. In the third essay I explore policy as a determinant of the education-based fertility gap. I use the 2007 Massachusetts healthcare reform which provides a good setting for evaluating the effect of an exogenous policy on the fertility. I find that fertility increases among young married women and decreases among young unmarried women but that there is no asymmetrical fertility response based on the education level of the mother.

Historically, blacks have viewed their lower socioeconomic status, relative to whites, as a result of structural limitations of society. People, white and black, have accepted that blacks have had more difficulty in making economic advancement due to societal barriers such as discrimination. As structural barriers have come down and it has become easier for blacks to move into the economic mainstream, it may be that those blacks who are moving upward no longer see structural limitations as the reason for economic inequality.Recent research distinguishes between two types of explanations for the gap. Theindividual explanation asserts that blacks' lower socioeconomic status is due to a lack of will power or effort on the part of blacks. In contrast, the structural explanation states that institutional barriers such as discrimination are to blame for the black-white socioeconomic gap. This study laid a solid foundation for an analysis of explanations for the black-white socioeconomic gap. However, it failed to investigate the relative proportion of blacks who adopt these explanations.It is the purpose of this paper to determine whether the individual and structural explanations for economic inequality is the same for blacks and whites.The most recent data from the General Social Survey is used to investigate this possibility. The sample and sub-sample sizes are 1517 and 1024, respectfully. / Department of Sociology

Political ideologies translate into both rhetoric and actual economic policy, and both are important factors for explaining economic development such as foreign direct investment and the distribution of growth. In Nicaragua, the government calls itself “socialist”, but neither local big business nor rating firms or foreign investors seem to be anxious. In this thesis, an attempt is made to define and measure characteristics of economic ideologies, and to analyse them in a country context.Factors are identified that would be characteristic for a “leftist” or to a “rightist” ideology, and then translated into measurable indicators, used to analyse the rhetoric, planning and legislation in Nicaragua. Actual outcomes are compared with previous liberal and socialist regimes. The result indicates that the actual economic policy of the current “marxist” government can be described as liberal or mildly social democratic. A similar analysis, made of IMF and Moody’s show that their assessments are based on liberal theory.One cause for this discrepancy between rhetoric and economic policy may be that no option is available in the globalised context with its unequal distribution of resources and power.

Numerous and countless factors have been theorized to be causes of inequality. This paper started with identifying the most important determinants of income inequality through theoretical research. Among the various theories of causes of inequality, I hypothesized creating a level playing for children at the very start of their career as students as an important determinant. In order to test the hypothesis that a level playing field is important to help fight inequality, a regression tailored for this question is created. I develop a regression model using the variable public expenditure on primary education as the variable to be tested while controlling for other important determinants of inequality including public expenditure per student on all stages of education, unemployment rate, GDP per capita, GDP growth, and governance indicator. The empirical model confirms theory that quality of primary education is highly beneficial for students. I conduct further theoretical research concerning ways to improve the quality of primary education and included them in policy recommendation section.

This paper examines data for 12,868 individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1979 through 2010 to explore certain financial incentives of marriage. In particular, this paper focuses on identifying the combination of occupations that decreases idiosyncratic income volatility to the greatest extent. For the sake of this paper, marriage is defined as the combination of two separate assets into a single portfolio. With such, I derive the efficient frontier for each occupation and gender. In the process, reward-to-volatility and mean-variance utility maximization techniques are introduced. Ultimately, applying modern portfolio theory to the marriage market allows one to examine the economic incentives of marriage in a way that has not previously been done. On the whole, the analysis confirms previous literature on marriage dynamics, while offering a new framework for analysis.

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1978. / Bibliography: leaves 217-229. / Microfiche. / xiii, 229 leaves 28 cm

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 200-208). / Microfiche. / ix, 208 leaves, bound map 29 cm