Three essays on poverty and inequality

This thesis contains three essays that analyses income inequality and poverty. Chapter 1 examines the impact of education on income inequality in 18 Latin American countries between 2000 and 2010. This period has raised interest in the academic community because inequality has fallen across the region, after several years of consistent high levels. Employing the novel technique proposed by Firpo et al., (2007) my research provides a detailed decomposition of inequality. In Chapter 2 I examine and contrasts poverty and inequality measures using income and consumption data from Mexico between 1994 and 2014. I investigate how poverty and inequality measures have changed over time and compare results using income and consumption based definitions. Using data from the Household Income and Expenditure Surveys (ENIGH), I construct four measures of resources two income based and two consumption based. The results suggest that income and consumption measures of poverty can complement each other when evaluating certain policy programs. In Chapter 3 we analyze the changes in the gender structure at the top of the income distribution in the United Kingdom over the last 19 years using administrative data from tax records. Despite the fact that women have increased their participation in the labour market over the past 20 years, they remained underrepresented at the very top of the income distribution.