Empirical Essays on Socioeconomic Inequality in the United States

This dissertation presents three empirical essays on socioeconomic inequality, focusing on the roles of circumstances, work arrangements, and intergenerational transmission of income in the United States and Germany. The first essay proposes measurement of inequality of opportunity in the United States by integrating social-interactions models from spatial econometrics into the standard parametric framework. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data for cohorts around 2000 and 2010, I decompose income inequality into effort- and circumstance-related components under both ordinary least squares and spatial-lag specifications. Accounting explicitly for spatial autocorrelation modestly changes the level and composition of inequality of opportunity, but consistently indicates that a nontrivial share of overall income inequality is driven by circumstances and peer environments rather than individual effort alone. The second essay examines how the rapid adoption of remote work has reshaped the wage distribution in the United States. Leveraging the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA), I document a sizable wage premium for remote workers relative to otherwise similar traditional workers. Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions at the mean and Recentered Influence Function (RIF) regressions across the wage distribution show that most of this premium reflects differences in returns to characteristics rather than differences in worker composition. The premium is largest at the top of the wage distribution, implying that the diffusion of remote work is likely to reinforce wage inequality unless countervailing forces emerge. The third essay develops a new welfare-based measure of intergenerational mobility that extends Atkinson’s one-dimensional framework to a multivariate, correlation-averse setting. Using PSID and German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data on fathers and sons, my co-authors and I construct a mobility index based on an intergenerational immobility premium and compare it to standard intergenerational earnings elasticities. Both approaches suggest slightly higher intergenerational mobility in the United States than in Germany, in contrast to much of the existing literature. Together, these essays contribute new tools and evidence for understanding how opportunity, work arrangements, and intergenerational linkages shape the evolution of income inequality.