The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a...

Over the last few decades, inequality has been decreasing sharply between countries. However, a person’s country of birth still determines more than half the differences in his or her income. This publication puts the spotlight on the catalyst behind inequality. It argues that the...

This cumulative dissertation consists of three essays. The first essays with the title ‘‘The Labor Market Effect of Opening the Border: Evidence from Switzerland’’ analyses the effect of opening the labor market for workers from the European Union in Switzerland after 1999. We exploit...