In Chapter 2, "Accounting for Cross-Country Differences in Intergenerational Earnings Persistence: The Impact of Taxation and Public Education Expenditure," I study the determinants of cross-country differences in intergenerational earnings persistence between fathers and sons. Western economies...

This thesis is a collection of three essays with contributions to the intergenerational and intra-generational mobility literature. The essay on full risk insurance and measurement error examines the likelihood that measurement error may reconcile observed departures from perfect rank immobility...

This dissertation contains three essays. The first and second essays examineintergenerational mobility in earnings in Brazil using a data set spanning three generations. I use data from PNAD{a nationally representative household survey inBrazil. I build a three-generations data set consisting of...

Many developing countries are afflicted by persistent inequality in the distribution of income. While a growing body of literature emphasizes differential fertility as a channel through which income inequality persists, this paper investigates differential child mortality – differences in the...

This thesis consists of three chapters, each of which focuses on different aspects of economic inequality.First, we investigate the differences in wage inequality between the United States and continental European countries (CEU). Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the US compared...

The paper models the policy challenges facing globalizing developing countries. Models from the pure theory of international trade, the small open economy model, growth accounting, the Solow- Swan model, the gravity model, models of portfolio diversification and currency crises models are...

The paper proposes a technique to jointly tests for groupings of unknown size in the cross sectional dimension of a panel and estimates the parameters of each group, and applies it to identifying convergence clubs in income per-capita. The approach uses the predictive density of the data,...

The impact of China's new rural income support policy and recent price trends on grain production and rural income inequality is assessed for two villages with different degrees of market access in Northeast Jiangxi Province. Two village-level general equilibrium models are used to analyze...

Since the highest income groups have tremendous influence over economic policy by virtue of money, position, and connection, it is important to identify the interest of these groups with regard to economic conditions. Recently, annual time series data on the shares of the very highest income...

Although the initial allocation of pollution permits is neutral in terms of efficiency, itdoes have a significant impact on distributive equity. In this paper, we examine the twomain categories of permit allocation rules, the distributive and the reductive, for controllingphosphorus pollution in...