Browsing by Subject "Income inequality"
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Item Equality of educational opportunity between low-income and well-off students : school and family inputs in two national cohorts of high school students(2015-08) Holas, Igor; Gershoff, Elizabeth T.; von Hippel, Paul T.; Huston, Aletha C; Crosnoe, Robert; Benner, Aprile DWhy do low-income students achieve lower test scores and attain less education than their better off peers? Can we close these gaps through redistribution of school funds? Fifty years ago the Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966) suggested that school resources had surprisingly little to do with these achievement gaps, and that school segregation, along with family background, were the primary drivers. In this dissertation I present two studies on two nationally representative cohorts of high school students (high school class of 1992 and 2004). In Study 1, I describe the differences between low- income and well-off students’ families (income, structure, home-language, and parental education), school resources (class size and teacher salary), student body characteristics, school and family interpersonal processes, and finally educational outcomes (test scores and attainment). In Study 2, I pursue a structural model to determine whether school resources or family characteristics relate more strongly to students’ outcomes, and to identify the mechanisms of influence. In both studies I explore changes in these relations for the two cohorts. Results from Study 1 indicate that low-income students differ from well off students on their family characteristics, characteristics of peers in school, and outcomes, but differences are slight on school funding or resources. Findings from Study 2 indicate that family background and school segregation relate the strongest to students’ outcomes with school funding and resources showing only weak relations.Item Essays on income inequality in the United States(2023-04-13) Castellanos Sosa, Francisco Alberto; Gawande, Kishore S., 1959-; Galbraith, James K; Stolp, Chandler W; Abner, Gordon BThis 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.Item Essays on monetary and fiscal policy(2020-05-01) Yang, Choongryul; Coibion, Olivier; Bhattarai, Saroj; Eusepi, Stefano; Sockin, MichaelMy dissertation investigates the transmission of monetary and fiscal policy using both empirical and theoretical frameworks. Chapter 1 examines how the number of products sold by a firm affect its decisions regarding price setting and information acquisition. Using a firm-level survey from New Zealand, I show that firms that produce more goods have both better information about aggregate inflation and more frequent but smaller price changes. To characterize the implications of these empirical findings for the ability of monetary policy to stimulate the economy, I develop a new dynamic general equilibrium model with rationally inattentive multi-product firms that pay a menu cost to reset their prices. I show that the interaction of the menu cost and rational inattention frictions leads firms to adopt a wait-and-see policy and gives rise to a new selection effect: firms have time-varying inaction bands widened by their subjective uncertainty about the economy such that price adjusters choose to be better informed than non-adjusters. This selection effect endogenously generates a distribution of desired price changes with a majority near zero and some very far from zero, which acts as a strong force to amplify monetary non-neutrality. I calibrate the model to be consistent with the micro-evidence on both prices and inattention and find two main quantitative results. First, the new selection effect, coupled with imperfect information of price setters, leads to real effects of monetary policy shocks in the one-good version of the model that are nearly as large as those in the Calvo model. Second, in the two-good version of the model, as firms optimally choose to have better information about monetary shocks, the real effects of monetary policy shocks decline by 20%. In Chapter 2, joint with Hassan Afrouzi, we develop a general equilibrium flexible price model with dynamic rational inattention in which the slope of the Phillips curve is endogenous to systematic aspects of monetary policy. This Phillips curve is flatter when the monetary policy is more hawkish: rationally inattentive firms find it optimal to ignore monetary policy shocks when the monetary authority commits to stabilize nominal variables. Moreover, an unexpectedly more dovish monetary policy leads to a completely flat Phillips curve in the short-run and a steeper Phillips curve in the long-run. We also develop a tractable method for solving general dynamic rational inattention models in linear quadratic Gaussian setups. Chapter 3 asks whether the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus policy depends on the degree of economic income inequality. Many previous works about state-dependence of fiscal multiplier have focused on the degree of slack in the economy. In a surge of concerns about rising inequality of the U.S., I use rich historical state-level data on military procurement and inequality to find the relationship between the degree of income inequality and the local government spending multipliers. I show that the effects of government spending shocks on output are larger in low-inequality states than in high-inequality states. In contrast, I find no evidence that employment multipliers differ by the extent of income inequality. These results are robust to various specifications and other sources of inequality data. I also estimate aggregate output multipliers using historical military spending and income inequality data. I find the evidence that aggregate output multipliers are high when the income inequality is low. Thus, both local and aggregate multipliers are significantly affected by the degree of income inequality of an economy. I consider a variety of potential theoretical explanations for the results, including heterogeneous within-sector inequality and distributional effects of government spending shock, but find that none can adequately explain this finding.