Economics
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Browsing Economics by Author "Esteve-Volart, Berta"
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Item Open Access Culture and Redistribution(2015-08-28) Quattrociocchi, Jeff; Esteve-Volart, BertaMy dissertation empirically examines whether characteristics of one's social groups influence an individual's preferences for redistribution. I begin by focusing on the socioeconomic status of the ethnic and religious groups one belongs to. First, I develop a theoretical framework where an individual's identity is strengthened by the status of their group. Then, utilizing data from the US General Social Survey, I find evidence that the average incomes of one's ethnic and religious groups are negatively correlated with one's preferences for redistribution. Controlling for household income, and a number of other individual-level characteristics and additional controls, I find that a standard deviation increase in the average income of one's social groups correlates to a weakening of an individual's preferences for redistribution by seven to eight percentage points. This result is robust to the inclusion of rich controls and alternate measures of group status, as well as a number of robustness checks, such as sample restrictions and the use of additional data. I then examine the relative importance a culture places on individualism vs. collectivism. Utilizing data from the European Social Survey, I find evidence that immigrants who were born in countries with a more individualistic culture tend to have weaker preferences for redistribution in their residence country. A standard deviation increase in the individualism of one's home country culture correlates to a weakening of an individual's preferences for redistribution by twelve percentage points. This relationship appears to be as strong as that between household income and preferences for redistribution (eleven percentage points). This result is robust to the inclusion of rich controls and the use of sample restrictions. The relationship appears to be stronger among immigrants who vote, belong to an ethnic minority and live in a country with a relatively high number of ethnic minorities. I also find that the relationship between preferences for redistribution and i) household income and ii) education is stronger among immigrants born in a country with an individualistic culture. Moreover, my analysis suggests that this trait is transmitted across generations, and bears some influence on the preferences for redistribution of second-generation immigrants as well.Item Open Access Three Essays in Development Economics(2017-07-27) Rubel, Ashfakuddin; Esteve-Volart, BertaThis dissertation focuses on certain policies and programmes that could help achieve four of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) endorsed by the United Nations (UN) to be achieved by 2030: ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns, achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, ensure access to water and sanitation for all. The three chapters build upon existing related literature in the field of development economics, with the first chapter offering a theoretical analysis from an environmental perspective and the other two chapters providing empirical contributions to the questions on women empowerment and quality of housing, water and sanitation. Most of the literature on trade and the environment has focused on production-generated pollution and ignored pollution emitted at the consumption stage such as municipal waste and exhaust from automobiles and home heating. The first chapter explores the importance of life-cycle environmental considerations in an oligopoly model of international trade with three countries (two exporters and one importer) and one traded good. It considers the implications of accounting for consumption-generated pollution on the optimal choice of environmental policy and welfare level in the exporting country with the lower marginal abatement cost relative to the other exporting country as well as on the optimal tariff, both when production-generated pollution is perfectly local and when it is a pure public bad. Whereas chapters two and three use data from the 1996 Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS) to study the effects of an intense outreach family planning program implemented in half of the 141 villages of rural Matlab, Bangladesh, from 1977 to 1996, on women's empowerment and on the quality of housing and general sanitation. To be able to capture the multidimensional nature of women's empowerment, we assess the program according to its impacts on different dimensions of women's empowerment: socio-economic and socio-cultural. Our findings support the idea that the family planning program enhanced women's empowerment in the treatment area in the socio-economic dimension and contributed, in some key aspects, to improvements in the quality of housing and sanitary conditions in the treatment area.