Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Sociology

The “Diverging Destinies” of American families has been a central focus of family demography for nearly two decades. Patterns of union and family formation associated with the second demographic transition have become stratified, particularly along the lines of maternal education, creating inequalities in children's household contexts and resources. Household wealth may also be highly relevant to increasing inequality among families as wealth predicts entry into marriage. However, unlike maternal education, household wealth gaps between family structures may grow throughout childhood as marriage facilitates subsequent wealth accumulation. Understanding the role of wealth in shaping the diverging destinies of children is vitally important given massive wealth inequality in the US and the importance of household wealth for children's college attendance and completion. In this dissertation, I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine (1) the association between children's family structure and household wealth over time, (2) how stability and change in family structure throughout childhood shapes household wealth accumulation, and (3) the consequences of household wealth for child well-being. My analyses lead to three central conclusions. First, family structure disparities in household wealth are wide and have remained quite stable over time, even in the face of growing wealth inequality and over the course of the Great Recession. In line with past research, I find that children living with married parents have the highest levels of household wealth, followed closely by children living with a remarried parent. These children have considerably more household wealth than children living with a divorced parent, and children living with a never married parent have the lowest levels of household wealth. My second central conclusion is that family instability, but not family structure, shapes household wealth accumulation throughout childhood. Fa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kristi Williams PhD (Committee Chair); Kammi Schmeer PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Sarah Hayford PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

This dissertation examines whether and how financial policies affect the distributions of income and wealth. It also explores and compares the evolution of income inequality, along an inverted U-shaped Kuznetsian path, when only human capital formation takes place and when the structural transformation of the labor force is accompanied by financial development. This is accomplished by numerically solving for the steady-state equilibrium of a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model of an economy with heterogeneous households (subject to labor productivity shocks), heterogeneous firms (subject to production shocks), and competitive banks that face frictions from policy-induced repression, incomplete institutions, and market imperfections. Policy simulations contrast the effects -of direct interventions in financial markets (namely, changes in required reserve ratios on deposits) and indirect interventions that improve the market environment (namely, infrastructure and institutions that differentially reduce default rates and costs of lending)- on the wedge between loan and deposit interest rates, deposits mobilized, credit available, output levels, wage earnings and shares in the wage bill, wealth levels (household deposits), and the dispersion of wage earnings and wealth (Gini coefficients). Simulation results reveal that, while direct policy interventions (manipulating required reserve ratios) may slightly improve income distributions, they do it at the cost of substantially lowering financial deepening and output and wage levels. While these adverse effects subside at advanced stages of development, these are not appropriate tools to pursue distributional goals. In contrast, pro-informal, pro-poor biased indirect policy interventions, resulting in lower default rates from informal firms or lower costs of lending to informal firms, show strong impacts in increasing output and wages (efficiency) and in reducing inequality in the distributions of income and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Claudio Gonzalez-Vega PhD (Advisor); Mario Miranda PhD (Committee Member); Abdoul Sam PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Finance

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Sociology

This dissertation consists of three studies of worker power and economic inequality. The studies extend inequality research by assessing the impacts of worker bargaining power on two less commonly examined outcomes: household wealth and employer-provided fringe benefits. I conceptualize and measure several types of worker power, spanning marketplace and associational forms, measured at the individual, local-regional, and institutional scales. The studies broaden theories of how worker bargaining power influences the wage and income distributions to the case of wealth and fringe benefits. In the first chapter, I examine the relationship between labor union coverage and household wealth accumulation and inequality. Informed by life course theories of cumulative advantage, I develop novel measures of cumulative exposure to unionization across the career. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort (NLSY-79) and fixed-effects regression, I find that cumulative career union coverage supports wealth accumulation. This positive association is driven by the influence of union coverage on the accumulation of savings and durable assets. Unconditional quantile regression models reveal that career union coverage is more strongly associated with increases in wealth for low- and middle- than high-wealth individuals. Results suggest worker power is associated with a more equal distribution of wealth and that deunionization contributed to rising wealth inequality among this cohort. The second chapter advances research on the determinants of job quality by considering the effects of worker power on fringe benefit offers. Using uniquely comprehensive data on benefits in the NLSY-79, I leverage changes in union coverage status due to involuntary job displacements (layoffs and business closures) to estimate the effects of unionization on the number of fringe benefits made available to workers by their employers. I find that transitioning to a union job i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rachel E. Dwyer (Advisor); Stephanie Moulton (Committee Member); Vincent J. Roscigno (Committee Member); Michael Vuolo (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Economics

In these essays, I explore how a liquid-illiquid asset choice affects economic predictions. In our daily lives, illiquid assets are represented by assets such as retirement accounts, home equity, and sometimes stock and bond holdings. While it is clear that this liquid-illiquid asset decision is vital to reproducing realistic consumption responses to fiscal stimuli,1 it is less clear if the inclusion of an illiquid asset is both necessary and sufficient for reasonable model results. In this work, I contribute to our understanding of these illiquid assets and their relative importance and distortion of our economic estimates. In my first chapter, “Fiscal Stimulus Payments & their Effect on Aggregate Consumption”, I focus on empirical analyses of the 2001 and 2008 stimulus checks which find strong effects on consumption on impact, but have been unable to identify longer-run effects. While some suggestive empirical evidence of long-run effects exists, attempts to empirically estimate effects beyond 2 quarters after a fiscal stimulus have been thwarted by data availability. This chapter finds evidence of long-term trends of these economic stimulus payments, and focuses in particular on how these trends vary across households with different levels of wealth. I find these effects within a model with a liquid-illiquid asset choice that is the first to reproduce moments from the distribution of marginal propensities to consume in the United States during a fiscal stimulus. Using this model, I show that the long-run effects of these fiscal stimuli are approximately twice that of the change in consumption on impact date. Furthermore, both in the model and empirical analysis, I show that while the consumption of hand-to-mouth households is statistically higher than that of otherwise similar households, I do not find evidence that the wealthy hand-to-mouth have similarly high MPCs either empirically or in the model. However, despite these 1In Kaplan and Violante (2014) (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Aubhik Khan (Advisor); Julia Thomas (Committee Member); Meta Brown (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics

Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.), Xavier University, 2021, Psychology

Wealth inequality in the United States is currently more pronounced than in previous years and most Americans prefer a more reasonable distribution wealth. However, Americans seem to be particular about resolutions to narrowing the wealth gap. Previous research suggests a longstanding opposition to welfare and its recipients, especially when the recipients are African American. The current study examined the degree to which the target race (i.e., African American or Caucasian) and the program label (i.e., welfare or assistance to the poor) account for support of and attitudes toward welfare and its recipients. Undergraduate students enrolled at a private, Jesuit university (N = 222; Mage = 20.10 years, SD = 1.86) read an article that described an anti-poverty program, along with characteristics of a current recipient and then completed questionnaires measuring support and attitudes. The majority of results did not reach statistical significance with response patterns indicating a tendency to neutrally respond. Statistically significant results revealed when the recipient was African American, support was indicated at a greater extent; and, when the program was labeled assistance to the poor, support for increased spending on the program was indicated at a greater extent, and it was less likely viewed as a burden for the average taxpayer. Exploratory analysis revealed an association between welfare and African Americans. Future research should continue to examine the opposition to welfare and its association with African Americans to determine if there is structural change occurring with associative evaluations or if the current study's results are more temporal.

Committee: Christian End Ph.D. (Advisor); Cindy Dulaney Ph.D. (Committee Member); Tammy Sonnentag Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Black Studies; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Political Science; Public Policy; Social Psychology; Social Research; Welfare

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Economics

Wealth inequality has always been part of American life, but not until recently has it risen to a level not seen since the Great Depression. In this dissertation, I present three essays in which the wealth gap issue is investigated in depth from three different perspectives. The first essay deals with entrepreneurs, a group of people significantly more affluent than the rest of the population. Inspired by vastly different results from Hurst and Lusardi [2004] and Fairlie and Krashinsky [2012], I examine how liquidity constraints affect business entry using a new dataset. My essay not only resolves the conflict between these two studies, but most of all, delivers a unified message about the topic. In the second essay, I incorporate a non-parametric estimate of earnings into a two-asset model to explore how much wealth owned by the richest 1% and 5% of the households can be accounted for. By relaxing the normality assumption imposed on earning shocks, my model can better fit the upper tail of the wealth distribution and generate fewer households with negative or zero wealth. The third essay explores two other wealth-generating channels: differential returns and intergenerational link in returns on assets. By building them into an overlapping generations framework, my model can almost perfectly match the wealth of the top 5% of the households and well replicate the wealth of the top percentile.

Committee: Pok-sang Lam (Advisor); Hijame Miyazaki (Committee Member); Lucia Dunn (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics

Master of Arts in History, Cleveland State University, 2020, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Prior to Tom L. Johnson's election to mayor of Cleveland in 1901, the city's tax system was rife with inequality. Johnson sought to correct these inequalities by democratizing Cleveland's tax system. To accomplish this aim, he established a new department in City Hall, called the “tax school,” which was designed to educate Clevelanders about the existing tax system's failures as well as Johnson's proposed solutions. The tax school worked to improve the tax assessment process by implementing a scientific approach, improving transparency, and soliciting citizen input. Johnson's efforts, however, met with resistance from an entrenched business elite that employed the state legislature and courts to destroy Johnson's tax school. Through political campaigns of misinformation, usurpation of the primary process, and stuffing key tax institutions with friendly partisans, these business elites conspired to control the tax machinery of Cuyahoga County. This study of Johnson's efforts to democratically reform Cleveland's tax system reveals how the city's business elite colluded to destroy the tax school and to retain the levers of tax power. In providing the canonical account of Cleveland's tax school, I situate the history of the tax school within a multi-party negotiation governed by unequal power relationships between business elites and the rest of society. The wealthiest Clevelanders possessed the greatest access to the tax system, and they used that access to rig the system in their favor.

Committee: J. Mark Souther (Advisor); Thomas J. Humphrey (Committee Member); Stephanie D. Hinnershitz (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Economics

In these essays, I explore two main quantitative theories of wealth inequality. These two theories are (1) uninsured earnings risk, and (2) entrepreneurship. For each theory, I build on the existing frameworks to study wealth concentration in the cross section -i.e. at a given point in time. I use micro-level data to quantitatively discipline, when needed, extend the existing theories. Also, I explore the ability of each model to explain the observed rise in the wealth inequality in the United states. In the first chapter, "Evolution of Inequality In the U.S.:Entrepreneurial Activity and Financial Intermediation", I focus on the importance of entrepreneurship on changes in the wealth inequality over time. The existing theories of wealth inequality and entrepreneurship - e.g. Quadrini (2000) and Cagetti and DeNardi (2006) - argue that occupational choice models explain cross sectional inequality. Building on these theories, I investigate whether changes in entrepreneurship over time also explain changes in inequality. There are two major trends in entrepreneurship in the U.S. data since 1975: the number of entrepreneurs has fallen, and the entrepreneurs' leverage has risen. In this chapter, I develop a general equilibrium, overlapping-generations model with occupational choice to examine if these trends have contributed to the observed rise in the wealth inequality. In the model, entrepreneurs borrow for investment in their projects. Production for entrepreneurs is subject an idiosyncratic random capital depreciation shock that is unknown at the time of investment. After observing their draw, entrepreneurs may default on their debt. A risk-neutral lender prices each individual debt contract consistent with the borrowers' risks of default. This is an extension of the cross-sectional theory of inequality proposed by Cagetti and DeNardi (2006), and allows me to use the available data about the entrepreneurial firms' default decisions to discipline the financial f (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Aubhik Khan (Advisor); Julia Thomas (Committee Member); Kyle Dempsey (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, Sociology

Income inequality has been rising in the U.S. in recent decades. Prior scholarship generally links increasing income inequality to labor market and demographic changes. However, these changes alone cannot explain the growing concentration of income at the very top of the income distribution nor the rising importance of financial income for wealthy households. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, I find that financial income, which is the returns to wealth, has come to account for the majority of overall income inequality in the last decade. This dramatic shift is a result of financialization, a set of interrelated processes that include financial deregulation as well as changes in the consumption and investment patterns of firms and households. This finding underscores the need to study property relations when examining income inequality.

Committee: Rachel Dwyer Dr. (Committee Chair); Hodson Randy Dr. (Committee Member); Martin Andrew Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Sociology

Since the late 1970s, researchers find that an increasingly large percentage of the economically disadvantaged are women, a fact contributing to a severe gender gap in income attainment. Most research on poverty and gender inequality focuses on salaries and wages as the primary proxy for evaluating economic well-being. However, earned income fluctuates greatly and may not provide an accurate picture of the economic welfare of an individual over time. In contrast, wealth – understood as the value of person's assets less their debts – captures long-term economic security. I broaden current research on gender and family status inequalities by using wealth as a measure of economic welfare. My research explores the joint effects of gender, marital status, and parenthood on net worth of economic assets and portfolio behavior in order to understand whether in the United States the feminization of the disadvantaged and the pauperization of motherhood extend to wealth. Further, to gain greater insight into the parental gap in wealth inequality, I focus on the timing of fertility behavior, specifically examining the effects of teen parenthood, adult parenthood, and childlessness on adult wealth for young baby boomers, born between 1957 and 1964.My analyses are based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth between 1979 and 2000. I find that young baby boomers' marital status and parental status are very strong predictors of adult wealth. Overall, the discovered patterns suggest that married couples have much greater wealth accumulation than single adults. I find evidence of a minimal to moderate gender gap in wealth accumulation for single adults. Moreover, when I control for parenthood, I find strong evidence of a family gap in net worth and portfolio behavior for single men and women. Single mothers and fathers are economically disadvantaged in comparison to adults without children, with single mothers suffering the most severe economic penalties. In addition, young bab (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kazimierz Slomzcynski (Advisor) Subjects: Sociology, General