Toppeta, Alessandro;
(2023)
Essays on Economics of Inequality and Skill Formation.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis consists of three Chapters investigating inequality and poverty from a human capital perspective. The first Chapter measures socio-economic (SES) gradients in test scores across countries, using data from international assessments, like Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Interestingly, SES gaps in PISA scores are not correlated with intergenerational earnings elasticities, but rather positively associated with SES gaps in parental investments. Surprisingly, Nordic countries show similar learning gaps to other European countries, suggesting limited equality of opportunity despite their generous social services. The second Chapter explores the intergenerational transmission of socio-emotional skills during childhood, using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) in the United Kingdom. This dataset enables me to measure internalizing and externalizing socio-emotional skills and use multiple measures of parents’ skills collected across their lifecycle. Findings reveal increasing persistence in skill transmission as parents age, with a stronger transmission observed from mothers to children. Additionally, leveraging data for three generations, I establish multi-generational persistence, namely a correlation between the grandmother’s internalising skill and the grandchildren’s skills, even after considering parental skills. The third Chapter investigates how to break the intergenerational transmission of inequalities by estimating the technology of skill formation in a family with siblings. Using the Millennium Cohort Study data in the United Kingdom, I introduce a novel variable, ”sibling bond”, which reflects how well siblings get along, and show that a stronger sibling bond is linked to persistent inequalities across households. I then structurally estimate the contribution of the sibling bond and parental investment to the formation of the younger and older siblings’ skills. The main finding is that a stronger sibling bond fosters both younger and older siblings’ human capital formation, even when accounting for parent-child interactions.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Essays on Economics of Inequality and Skill Formation |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Economics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10178089 |
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