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...

In this paper, we conduct the novel exercise of analyzing the relationship between overall wealth inequality and caste divisions in India using nationally representative surveys on household wealth conducted during 1991-92 and 2002-03. According to our findings, the groups in India that are...

Income inequality is on the rise, and everyone, from President Obama and Pope Francis to Prince Charles and Standard & Poor's, is talking about it. But these conversations about what are arguably the most significant changes in the distribution of incomes and earnings since the 1940s are leading...

Society drifts apart in many dimensions. Economists focus on income of the poor and rich and the distribution of income but a broader spectrum of dimensions is required to draw the picture of multiple facets of individual life. In our study of multidimensional polarization we extend the income...

Over the last decades, researchers have found compelling evidence of hiring discrimination toward ethnic minorities based on field experiments using fictitious job applications. Despite increasing efforts to discover why ethnic minorities experience hiring penalties, the academic world has not...

After the fierce class struggles in the first postwar years, a societal model describing Japan as a general middle-class society with outstanding equality in opportunities and outcome became dominant. In recent years, a new societal model of Japan as a divided society has replaced this general...