Three Essays on Institutions and Equality

Abstract

Economic inequality is severe and persistent worldwide, hurting minorities and economically disadvantaged groups especially (Dabla-Norris et al., 2015). Institutions are one of the most striking factor in
shaping social norms, political structure and economic developments, which can either increase or reduce
economic disparities. This essay contains three chapters investigating the effect of three different types of
institutions on voting behaviours, economic inclusions and social norms, focusing on different sub-groups
of minorities, respectively.
The first chapter focuses on the political consequence of adopting an inclusive law in the United
States, namely the Law of Same-Sex Marriage (SSM). Exploiting the variation in the timing of adoption
across states and employing a two-way fixed effects research design, I show that voluntary adoption
of SSM laws increased the share of votes going to Democrats by 2.5 percentage points in presidential
elections. These effects are mainly driven by counties which were dominated by the Republican party in
the baseline election in 2000. Further analysis highlights the importance of the political efficacy channel
instead of the attitudes channel. Also, voter turnout and political donations can hardly explain the voting
effects. However, the Supreme Court Ruling on SSM had strong backlash effects on attitudes toward
sexual minorities, although it did not significantly affect voting behaviour or the perception of political
efficacy.
The second chapter tests the hypothesis of whether a minimum wage policy, namely the Fair Labour
Standard Act (FLSA) of 1966 in the United States, can start a virtuous cycle of inequality reduction in
education and income, especially regarding racial disparities. The FLSA of 1966 extended the FLSA of
1938 to some industries, such as agriculture, where black workers were overrepresented. Employing a
across-industry across-cohort two-way fixed effects research design, we show that the reform increased
completed years of education by 0.569 years among treated cohorts and whose parents worked in industries
newly covered in FLSA. The effects are driven by an 8.1 percentage points increase in college attainment and a 7.0 percentage points decrease in dropout before finished high school. Both linear DID and nonlinear data-driven causal forest approaches show that the magnitude of the effect is much larger for
black children than for white children. The reform reduced the racial gap in education by 31% among
treated cohorts. However, the positive effect on education did not significantly affect the next generation’s
employment status and wages.
The third chapter investigates the effects of communist regimes on women’s attitudes toward working
and gender roles. Using the forced state socialism in Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC)
after World War II, I show that women from CEEC were more likely to attach importance to working
than women from Western European countries (WEC), compared to the difference between CEEC and
WEC for men. However, the magnitude of impact was small and disappeared rapidly after the end of
communism. Regarding attitudes toward working values, CEEC women were more likely to work for
civil duty, while WEC women worked for self-fulfilment. In terms of feminist attitudes, this paper uses a
rich set of indicators to show that communist regimes only supported progressive feminist attitudes related
to work. Taken together, these results indicate that the magnitude of the effect of communism was small
and, for most outcomes, transitory. The findings suggest that policy incentives and short-term effects of
propaganda are more relevant mechanisms than long-lasting ideological changes.

Date of Award	7 May 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Christine M F Valente (Supervisor) & Hans Henrik Sievertsen (Supervisor)