Essays on Socioeconomic Inequality

Abstract

This dissertation studies several aspects of socioeconomic inequality. Chapter 1 compares the relative importance of inequality across neighborhoods in explaining overall inequality among black South Africans using variance decomposition methods. I find a statistically significant difference between the neighbor correlation in former bantustans and the former white South Africa. The neighborhood-level average consumption of black households in the former white South Africa exhibits a level of variation that is an order of magnitude greater than in the former bantustans. Urban status, region, and household-level education explain some of this difference, but this difference remains largely unexplained. Chapter 2 replicates previous findings on sibling and neighbor correlations in educational attainment using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The replication establishes comparability across multiple methods and forms a solid foundation from which to compare the developed and developing world. Using dataset comparable to these foundational works, I show sibling and neighbor correlations in Indonesia closer to the estimates in the developed world. The similarity of correlations indicates a similar level of the importance of the family relative to outside factors. However, the variance of years of schooling in Indonesia is much higher than in the US. That is, the educational significance of the family and neighborhood effect is much higher in Indonesia than in the US. Chapter 3 is the first attempt to group individual age-income profiles by the similarity of the profiles. Since many factors likely correlate with any chosen demographic feature, starting with emergent lifecycle patterns permits a more thorough analysis of likely causes. For example, previous papers compared income profiles across education groups, while this paper compares educational attainment across income profile groups. I find that individuals with high-growth or hump-shaped age-income profiles have higher levels of education and lifetime income than those with steady-declining or early-U age-income profiles.