The dynamics of inequality, minorities and school choice
(2012)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- de la Croix, David
- Abstract
- (en) This dissertation investigates the dynamics of inequality from different perspectives: ideological affiliation and protection of cultural trait; ethnicity and minority status; income and socio-economic conditions. The first Chapter provides a general introduction and describes the main objectives and results of the thesis. Chapter 2 studies under which conditions a given trait, such as religion or language, can be preserved in the long-run. Compared to the existing literature, the model yields two new results. First, paternalistic preferences in children's are a necessary but not a sufficient condition to ensure the preservation of heterogeneity in the long-run distribution of traits. Second, it is able to reproduce historical events in which a reversal of parents' evaluation of traits has been observed. Chapter 3 investigates why fertility behaviors and educational decisions appear to vary systematically across ethnic groups. In this paper we model an uncertainty mechanism that has an heterogeneous effect on fertility across groups: we find support for the minority status hypothesis according to which members of large minorities usually have a higher fertility than the majority facing low potential for social mobility while small minorities have lower fertility. Chapter 4 analyzes the existence of mixed income communities within cities. The model predicts that in highly unequal societies low and high income households choose to live in the same community but segregate by schooling, enrolling their children respectively in publicly-funded and private schools. In contrast, when inequality is smaller, we observe the typical sorting by income across communities. When inequality increases, if the housing conditions of the community in which rich and poor households cohabit are affordable, then an inflow of high-income middle class households towards this community emerges. This process, namely gentrification, implies that inequality will negatively impact the quality of the public school of the mixed income community, because both rich and poor households will vote for lower taxation.
- Affiliations
Citations
Melindi Ghidi, P. (2012). The dynamics of inequality, minorities and school choice. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/160879