Essays on income, education and intra-household poverty and inequality
(2018)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Maniquet, François
- Abstract
- This thesis speaks to the broad literature studying poverty and inequality issues. It presents novel contributions within these fields, ranging from developments on poverty measurement to determinants of inequality that have been overlooked in the past. In Chapter 1, jointly with Véronique Gille, we focus on an unexplored mechanism to explain the race gap in education in the US. Specifically, we evaluate the effect of the election of the first black state governor in the history of the US, who took power in Virginia in 1990, on educational outcomes of black students from the same state. We find a sizeable increase in the probability of getting a high school diploma for black students in Virginia relative to Whites and other states, which cannot be fully explained by policy changes. In Chapter 2, jointly with Benoit Decerf, we study income poverty under unequal growth using a family of measures that balances absolute and relative poverty by the use of a weight parameter. We develop new theoretical results to estimate the degree of robustness of poverty evaluations to this weight parameter. We apply these developments to study poverty under unequal growth in the US and find two main results. First, our measure concludes that poverty has decreased over the most recent period of unequal growth, in line with the official absolute measure. Second, poverty judgments are largely robust to the choice of the weight parameter. Finally, Chapter 3 evaluates how the individual valuation of goods that are jointly consumed within a household can affect poverty and inequality. I use consumer data to estimate the marginal willingness to pay for joint consumption by gender within Belgian couples. My findings indicate that women get less utility from public goods than men. This implies that consumption inequality and in particular female poverty are larger than when we ignore these differences in the individual valuation of joint consumption.
- Affiliations
Citations
Ferrando Gutierrez, M. (2018). Essays on income, education and intra-household poverty and inequality. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/172811