This thesis consists of three empirical chapters related to distributional outcomes, such as poverty and inequality, in three different contexts. Chapter 1 outlines a class of statistical procedures that permit testing of a broad range of multidimensional stochastic dominance hypotheses. We apply the procedures to data on income and leisure hours for individuals in Germany, the UK, and the USA. We find that no country first-order stochastically dominates the others in both dimensions for all years of comparison. Furthermore, while in general the USA stochastically dominates Germany and the UK with respect to income, in most periods Germany stochastically dominates with respect to leisure hours. Finally, we find evidence that bivariate poverty is lower in Germany than in either the UK or the USA. On the other hand, poverty comparisons between the UK and the USA are sensitive to the subpopulation of individuals considered. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of the evolution of income inequality in Vietnam between 1993 and 2006. We construct consistent estimates of annual household income using five nationally representative household surveys. Our main finding is that Vietnam’s rapid growth was accompanied by a reduction in inequality between 1993 and 2002 and an unchanged level of inequality between 2002 and 2006. We find that strong growth in employment income and robust growth of cropping income played an important role in decreasing rural inequality, while the growth of wage income and the stagnation of household business income similarly contributed to the reduction in urban inequality. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of the 2001 U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement on provincial poverty level in Vietnam. My main finding is that provinces that were more exposed to the U.S. tariff cuts experienced faster decreases in poverty between 2002 and 2004. I subsequently explore three labour market channels from the trade agreement to poverty alleviation. Provinces that were more exposed to the tariff cuts experienced (1) increases in provincial wage premiums for low-skilled workers, (2) faster movement into wage and salaried jobs for low-skilled workers, and (3) more rapid job growth in formal enterprises.

This dissertation consists of three essays in Macroeconomics. The first essay assesses the impact of offshoring on aggregate productivity and on labour market outcomes by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which workers acquire task-specific human capital. The dynamic nature of the model allows for differentiation between short and long run effects. While the welfare effects are unambiguously positive and independent of the skill-content of the offshored and inshored tasks, the distribution of the gains from trade critically depends on the time horizon. Workers with human capital specific to the inshored tasks gain over those performing offshored tasks in the short term. In the long run, the gains from trade are equally distributed among ex-ante identical agents. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy; welfare gains from increased offshoring are found to be substantial even after taking into account losses in specific human capital for workers in the offshored occupations along the transition path. The second essay integrates the insight that exporting firms are typically more productive and employ higher skilled workers into a directed search model of the labour market. The model generates a skill premium as well as residual wage inequality among identical workers. Trade liberalization will cause a reallocation of workers both within and across industries, which will affect both types of inequality in a way that is consistent with findings from the empirical literature on trade and inequality. A calibrated version of the model can account for much of the effect of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement on the Canadian labour market. The final essay incorporates a distortionary tax into the microfoundations of money framework and revisits the optimum quantity of money. An optimal policy may consist of both a positive tax rate and a positive nominal interest rate: if the buyer's surplus share is inefficiently small, the intensive margin is distorted and the constrained optimal policy combines a sales tax with a money growth rate above that prescribed by the Friedman rule. Monetary, but not fiscal, policy alters the agent's bargaining position, leaving a special role for a deviation from the Friedman rule.

Social inequalities exist in smoking-attributable mortality rates of males. Change in these social inequalities in the past two decades in developed countries remains uncertain. This study was conducted in Canada, France, Poland, and Switzerland to quantify differences in smoking-attributable mortality rates, at ages 35-69 years, among different social strata in recent years and to examine the changes in social inequalities in these rates between 1986 and 2001. Analyses included 377,878 deaths from a total population of 13,482,210 males of these four countries. Smoking-attributable mortality rates reduced in all strata over the comparative time periods, in all countries, except France. This work specifically focuses to fill the gap in knowledge about whether tobacco control has reached the poor or lower social strata in developed countries. This study will enable follow up research including quantification of effects of the specific tobacco control policies in each country.

Social inequalities exist in smoking-attributable mortality rates of males. Change in these social inequalities in the past two decades in developed countries remains uncertain. This study was conducted in Canada, France, Poland, and Switzerland to quantify differences in smoking-attributable mortality rates, at ages 35-69 years, among different social strata in recent years and to examine the changes in social inequalities in these rates between 1986 and 2001. Analyses included 377,878 deaths from a total population of 13,482,210 males of these four countries. Smoking-attributable mortality rates reduced in all strata over the comparative time periods, in all countries, except France. This work specifically focuses to fill the gap in knowledge about whether tobacco control has reached the poor or lower social strata in developed countries. This study will enable follow up research including quantification of effects of the specific tobacco control policies in each country.

This thesis examines the differences of experiences in working-class and middleclass women's lives due to childhood gender-role socialization and current situations in their lives. The purpose of the study is to examine how past and present experiences influenced four groups of women in making career decisions: 1) owners of nontraditional (male-type) businesses, 2) owners of traditional (female-type) businesses, 3) non-owners of nontraditional (male-type) businesses, and 4) non-owners of traditional (female-type) businesses. Both social and cognitive processes were examined for clues. In-depth interviews were conducted with a total of twenty women to examine their Childhood and current experiences of gender socialization. The women were chosen on the basis of their current occupation. Questions were designed to elicit descriptions of respondents' experiences regarding: 1) common interactions with siblings, friends, parents, and teachers (significant others); 2) messages about careers and educational options from significant others; 3) messages about motherhood from significant others; 4) gender stereotyped actions from significant others; 5) role models; 6) parental education and occupational training; 7) current social networks; 8) how the respondent became interested in her career; 9) respondents' work experiences and educational levels; and 10) major influences on respondents' occupational choices. The socialization approach was used to analyze and explain how these women's experiences affected their career choices. In addition symbolic interactionism and a middle-range theory called habitus and field by Pierre Bourdieu were used. It was found that women who are from the working class experience a cumulative disadvantage due to an internalized scheme through which their values are filtered. In addition, the opportunity structure is not as developed for working-class women as it is for women who are considered middle class (based on their occupation). Business owners were found to have many shared experiences which were not common to the other category of women. The first is that most business owners turned out to have been raised by parents with liberal gender-role attitudes. As a result, most reported that motherhood was not an assumed fact for their lives. When motherhood is not assumed, girls feel less pressure to prioritize marriage and family above a career. In addition, eight out of ten business owners had parents who actively encouraged Achievement values. All ten business owners learned to set long-term goals as children, and most had nontraditional hobbies. Nine out of ten business owners, as opposed to four out of ten non-business owners, had parents who actively supported their hobbies. Also, the majority of business owners, as children, had known and admired at least one person who had an interesting career. The non-business owners and the women who are in traditional occupations are cumulatively disadvantaged as regards their ability to make a completely free choice regarding a career. During childhood they received more messages that might have led them to assume that motherhood must take priority over career plans; they experienced fewer nontraditional hobbies and less parental support regarding long-term goals; they had less exposure to women in nontraditional careers or to women who were business owners; they had less assistance planning a career; and their parents provided fewer achievement-oriented activities and were less likely to interact with them on a regular basis. Thus far during adulthood they have experienced less support for their career goals; they experience less autonomy, flexibility, and creativity on the job, and they are likely to feel less confident about financial planning and their own leadership ability: Over all, they have lower self-confidence than business owners and women in nontraditional careers.

This thesis consists of three empirical chapters related to distributional outcomes, such as poverty and inequality, in three different contexts. Chapter 1 outlines a class of statistical procedures that permit testing of a broad range of multidimensional stochastic dominance hypotheses. We apply the procedures to data on income and leisure hours for individuals in Germany, the UK, and the USA. We find that no country first-order stochastically dominates the others in both dimensions for all years of comparison. Furthermore, while in general the USA stochastically dominates Germany and the UK with respect to income, in most periods Germany stochastically dominates with respect to leisure hours. Finally, we find evidence that bivariate poverty is lower in Germany than in either the UK or the USA. On the other hand, poverty comparisons between the UK and the USA are sensitive to the subpopulation of individuals considered. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of the evolution of income inequality in Vietnam between 1993 and 2006. We construct consistent estimates of annual household income using five nationally representative household surveys. Our main finding is that Vietnam’s rapid growth was accompanied by a reduction in inequality between 1993 and 2002 and an unchanged level of inequality between 2002 and 2006. We find that strong growth in employment income and robust growth of cropping income played an important role in decreasing rural inequality, while the growth of wage income and the stagnation of household business income similarly contributed to the reduction in urban inequality. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of the 2001 U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement on provincial poverty level in Vietnam. My main finding is that provinces that were more exposed to the U.S. tariff cuts experienced faster decreases in poverty between 2002 and 2004. I subsequently explore three labour market channels from the trade agreement to poverty alleviation. Provinces that were more exposed to the tariff cuts experienced (1) increases in provincial wage premiums for low-skilled workers, (2) faster movement into wage and salaried jobs for low-skilled workers, and (3) more rapid job growth in formal enterprises.

This dissertation consists of three essays in Macroeconomics. The first essay assesses the impact of offshoring on aggregate productivity and on labour market outcomes by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which workers acquire task-specific human capital. The dynamic nature of the model allows for differentiation between short and long run effects. While the welfare effects are unambiguously positive and independent of the skill-content of the offshored and inshored tasks, the distribution of the gains from trade critically depends on the time horizon. Workers with human capital specific to the inshored tasks gain over those performing offshored tasks in the short term. In the long run, the gains from trade are equally distributed among ex-ante identical agents. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy; welfare gains from increased offshoring are found to be substantial even after taking into account losses in specific human capital for workers in the offshored occupations along the transition path. The second essay integrates the insight that exporting firms are typically more productive and employ higher skilled workers into a directed search model of the labour market. The model generates a skill premium as well as residual wage inequality among identical workers. Trade liberalization will cause a reallocation of workers both within and across industries, which will affect both types of inequality in a way that is consistent with findings from the empirical literature on trade and inequality. A calibrated version of the model can account for much of the effect of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement on the Canadian labour market. The final essay incorporates a distortionary tax into the microfoundations of money framework and revisits the optimum quantity of money. An optimal policy may consist of both a positive tax rate and a positive nominal interest rate: if the buyer's surplus share is inefficiently small, the intensive margin is distorted and the constrained optimal policy combines a sales tax with a money growth rate above that prescribed by the Friedman rule. Monetary, but not fiscal, policy alters the agent's bargaining position, leaving a special role for a deviation from the Friedman rule.

<p>When do individuals feel that economic inequality needs to be corrected through redistributive government policy, such as progressive taxes or social spending? Using a cross-national data set of public opinion across both developing and developed countries, this dissertation finds that political context plays a key role in determining how individuals view economic inequality and their support for redistributive social policy. An overarching theme throughout the dissertation is that political elites are key in making inequality a prominent issue for the public. This is done by framing individual attributes such as income, ethnic identity or geographic local (urban vs. rural) in a way that will either maximize or minimize support for redistribution. When political elites lack incentives to mobilize public opinion on the issue, it becomes unlikely that individual attributes such as income or ethnicity will predict support for redistribution.</p> / Dissertation

Since the 1980's, wage inequality in the U.S. has been dramatically increasing. I investigate the impact of occupational structure, measured at the three-digit level, on this trend of growing wage inequality. The investigation is conducted in terms of three major research tasks. First, I test the validity of the 'disaggregate structuration' view in relation to growing wage inequality. The 'disaggregate structuration' view is suggested as an alternative to big class theories. Theorists of the 'disaggregate structuration' view assert that an occupation is a gemeinschaftlich community characterized by internal homogeneity. Thus, this view implies that most of the rise in inequality occurs between occupations and that within-occupational inequality is actually decreasing, due to the progress of 'occupationalization.' My analyses, however, find that the majority of the growth in inequality has occurred within occupations. Secondly, I thus seek a more delineated explanation for the causes of rising within-occupational inequality. I investigate whether previously proposed hypotheses can account for this phenomenon. Hypotheses that I test include demographic change, deindustrialization, unions, insecure employment relations, increases in the return to skill, and changes of firm organizations. Although smaller than within-occupational inequality, between-occupational inequality has also been growing during this period. Thirdly, I therefore investigate the changes of between-occupational inequality. Since between- occupational inequality is a weighted sum of occupational mean wages, I examine whether the same hypotheses tested for within-occupational inequality can explain the changes in occupational mean wages over time. Using the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1983 to 2002, I find that as within-occupational inequality has grown faster than between-occupational inequality, the direct association between occupational structure and wage inequality has declined over this period. While the importance of general skills (i.e., education) in determining workers' wages is growing, the importance of occupation-specific skills is declining. For regression models of hourly wages, the amount of R-squared increase by adding three-digit occupational codes (331 occupational dummies) in addition to general skills (5 dummies of education) has decreased for this period. Therefore, the strong version of 'aggregate structuration' and 'occupationalization' is not supported. I would like to note, however, that the R-squared of hourly wage increases jumped significantly when we use three-digit occupational codes instead of one-digit occupational codes even after adjusting for the degrees of freedom. Thus, the weak version of structuration is not rejected. For multivariate tests, inequality indexes and other variables by detailed occupation are extracted from each year's CPS and merged into one panel data file with occupation as a unit of analysis. Multi-level growth models are then estimated using detailed occupational categories as the unit of analysis in order to assess how the structural characteristics of occupations affect changes in mean wages and wage inequality over this time period. Contrary to the expectations of the skill-biased technological change hypothesis, changes in the distribution of education do not affect the growth of wage inequality within occupations. In contrast to the traditional view of unions as promoting wage equality, within-occupational inequality is increased by unionization. The increase of female labor market participation seems to pull down inequality in an occupation. Deindustrialization does not account for the rise of intra-occupational inequality, while insecure employment relations do. As expected by the organizational change view, inequality grows faster in high skill jobs and service jobs. Regarding between-occupational inequality, traditional explanations do better jobs in accounting for its change than for within-occupational inequality. Skill biased technological changes and unions have positive effects on occupational mean wages. Multi-level growth models provide additional evidence against disaggregate structuration. The disaggregate structuration view assumes that occupational common interests will be achieved as accomplishment of active occupational associations. Thus, the changes of occupational mean wage, which is a clearly common interest of members in an occupation, should be explained by occupation itself, not by other demographic and institutional variables. Contrary to this expectation, most of the within-occupational variation are not explained well by other demographic and institutional variables, including race, gender, and unions. In conclusion, although sociologists often view occupation as the back-bone of the stratification system, the rise in within-occupational inequality suggests that broader, more complex approaches may be needed in order to better explain the increasing disparity in wages. I suggest that more attention should be given to firm level studies in which changes inside and between firms are investigated. / text

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of income inequality on individual creativity. Specifically, it is hypothesized that an individual’s creative performance (via a remote associatives test) is affected negatively in a high income inequality condition. Theoretical research suggests that the mechanism that enables this is self-regulation. As such self-regulation is measured as a mediator in this relationship. Two online-panel experiments were designed and conducted to test these relationships. The results did not show significant results for the mediation relationship. Self-regulation does have a positive relationship with creative performance, and income inequality shows a negative relationship with creativity in some conditions, however there is no relationship between income inequality and self-regulation. This research develops the theoretical background for the relationship between income inequality, self-regulation, and creativity. It also provides some lessons-learned from an experimental mediation design with an independent variable that has multiple categorical variables. / October 2015