Essays on Economic Mobility and Inequality in the United States

Essays on Economic Mobility and Inequality in the United States
Author: Deirdre Bloome
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

How does economic mobility over the individual life course shape population-level trends in economic inequality, and, in turn, how does this inequality influence individuals' economic mobility prospects? Historically, allowing opportunities for economic mobility has been seen as an American alternative to equalizing incomes. However, after decades of rising inequality across the population and persistent disparity between racial groups, many academics and policymakers have come to question how neatly we can separate the two.

Inequality and Economic Policy

Inequality and Economic Policy
Author: Tom Church (Research fellow)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780817919047

Proceedings of the Conference on Inequality in Memory of Gary Becker held September 25-26, 2014 at the Hoover Institution.

Inequality and Economic Policy

Inequality and Economic Policy
Author: Tom Church
Publisher: Hoover Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0817919066

Drawing from a 2014 Hoover Institution Conference on Inequality in honor of Gary Becker, a group of distinguished contributors explore various measures of inequality in America and address the issue of whether or not it is increasing. In looking at this question and examining policy implications, the authors draw on research on human capital and intergenerational mobility. The authors suggest that the emphasis on inequality and redistribution, while not wrong, is nevertheless misplaced, for it may lead us to adopt policies that will disrupt the progress we have made while doing nothing to promote the kind of growth that is essential to national progress.

Essays on the Economic, Demographic, and Social Dynamics of Income Inequality in the United States

Essays on the Economic, Demographic, and Social Dynamics of Income Inequality in the United States
Author: Jaclyn Butler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation examines the economic, demographic, and social dynamics of income inequality in the United States. Income inequality is high, and rising, in the United States. Given that income inequality is associated with adverse societal outcomes, it is important to understand the causes and consequences of income inequality. The first chapter examines the effects of manufacturing employment on inequality in U.S. counties, and builds on prior research by disaggregating this sector into the durable and non-durable subsectors. I find that the effects of each subsector vary over time (1990 to 2016) and by county rural-urban status. The protective effects of both durable and nondurable manufacturing have weakened over time in both rural and urban counties, but disproportionately so in urban counties. By the end of the study period, the protective effect of both subsectors was only detected in rural counties. The second chapter examines the effects of population aging on income inequality in U.S. commuting zones and examines whether these effects vary between the mechanisms of aging: aging-in-place and retirement migration. Income inequality is measured as change in the overall level of income inequality and as the shifting shape of the income distribution from 2000 to 2010. I find evidence that population aging's effect on income inequality varies by the aging mechanism. Population aging in the context of aging-in-place decreases income shares in the middle of the distribution. Population aging in the context of retirement migration increases the overall level of income inequality, decreases income shares at the bottom of the distribution, and increases income shares at the top of the distribution. The third chapter examines whether and how people living and working in a high-inequality context perceive the economic and social dynamics of income inequality. Using a case study approach, this chapter uses interview data from 12 study participants to understand the perceptions, causes, and consequences of income inequality in Hancock County, Maine. The findings indicate that participants accurately perceive that income inequality is high, and increasing, in Hancock County. Participants discussed the community's status as a New England summer colony and major tourist destination, which concentrates employment growth in the lower-wage and seasonal service industry. Participants also expressed concern that the housing affordability crisis and the AirBnB economy have hollowed out the sense of community among working- and family-aged residents with lower to moderate incomes. These three papers provide unique insight into the economic, demographic, and social dynamics of income inequality. Their distinctive contributions include analysis of the underlying components of two major economic and demographic processes in the United States (deindustrialization and population aging), as well as qualitative insight into the social dynamics of income inequality in a high-inequality context.

Essays on Income Inequality in the United States

Essays on Income Inequality in the United States
Author: Francisco Alberto Castellanos Sosa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation studies income inequality in the United States during the last two decades. The connections income inequality has with other topics and its measurement features allow for its exploration from different perspectives, giving origin to the overarching objective of this dissertation. To examine contemporaneous U.S. income inequality under two of the three stands it might take in any research process: a phenomenon itself and a dependent (outcome) variable. Therefore, the chapters in this dissertation position income inequality under a different spotlight, using a wide array of quantitative methodologies. Income inequality is first considered a phenomenon and disaggregated under Liao's (2016) decomposition at an in-vogue geographical level: Commuting Zones. Such decomposition helps identify the within-share element from a commonly shared income range across all local labor markets and the within-differentiation arising from the differences across the income distributions. Then, it is possible to identify the degree to which the within, between, within-share, and within-differentiations inequality dynamics drive its overall increasing pattern. This approach identifies, through the between component, those local labor markets exerting the most influence in the overall measure. The second perspective considers income inequality as a dependent variable throughout the study of income effects at different parts of its distribution and directly on traditional measures. In doing so, the quasi-random staggered implementation of the Secure Communities program (hereon referred to as SC) is exploited. SC is, in a few words, a federal program to strengthen immigration enforcement efforts across different levels of government agencies. Short-term effects of SC on income inequality are obtained using the improved doubly robust difference-in-differences (DiD) estimator weighted for multiple treatment periods (DRIMP) proposed by Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021). Effects in overall wages, by gender and main education groups, by income deciles, and by traditional inequality measures are estimated

Essays on Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality in Economic History

Essays on Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality in Economic History
Author: James Feigenbaum
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation explores intergenerational mobility and inequality in the early twentieth century. The first chapter asks whether economic downturns increase or decrease mobility. I estimate the effect of the Great Depression on mobility, linking a sample of fathers before the Depression to their sons in 1940. I find that the Great Depression lowered intergenerational mobility for sons growing up in cities hit by large downturns. The effects are driven by differential, selective migration: the sons of richer fathers are able to move to better destinations. The second chapter compares historic rates of intergenerational mobility to today. Based on a sample matched from the Iowa 1915 State Census to the 1940 Federal Census, I argue that there was more mobility in the early twentieth century than is found in contemporary data, whether measured using intergenerational elasticities, rank-rank correlations, educational persistence, or occupational status measures. In the third chapter, I detail the machine learning method used to create the linked census samples used in chapters 1 and 2. I use a supervised learning approach to record linkage, training a matching algorithm on hand-linked historical data which is able to efficiently and accurately find links in noisy in historical data.

An Essay on the Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States (1896)

An Essay on the Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States (1896)
Author: Charles Barzillai Spahr
Publisher:
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2008-06-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9781436771986

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Social Differentiation And Social Inequality

Social Differentiation And Social Inequality
Author: James N Baron
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100023987X

The essays included in this volume honor a truly gifted teacher and sociologist, John C. Pock. After a brief stint at the University of Illinois, Pock moved in 1955 to Reed College, a highly regarded but very small liberal arts institution (roughly 1,000 students) located in Portland, Oregon. Pock has spent the rest of his career (to date) there. During his forty-year tenure at Reed College, the sociology department usually had only two faculty members. Even so, during this period as many as 104 students graduated with majors in sociology and 69 established professional careers as sociologists. (A listing, which is assuredly incomplete, of Reed students during Pock's tenure who went on to professional careers in sociology is presented in an appendix to this volume.) Many of these sociologists have been extremely successful and influential within the discipline. Reed sociologists have taught or are teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Michigan, Northwestern, Stanford, UCLA, Wisconsin, and other leading U.S. academic departments. Others have been employed as researchers in such prominent institutions within and outside the United States as RAND, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Opinion Research Center, the East-West Center, the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Sloan Foundation, and the Australian National University.