Subject Area

Economics

Abstract

This dissertation consists of essays on how family resource allocation and cultural values shape innovation, inequality, and long-run economic development. Across the chapters, I combine quantitative modeling and empirical analysis to understand the determinants of inequality and long-run growth.

Chapter 1 studies how parental fertility and bequest decisions affect children’s potential to become entrepreneurs when financial barriers exist. Motivated by evidence that high-income parents tend to have fewer children and leave larger bequests and allocate more resources per child, I develop an overlapping-generations model with endogenous fertility, bequests, and occupational choice, calibrated to U.S. data. The model shows that, when borrowing constraints interact with parental fertility and bequest choices, entrepreneurship decisions become distorted and aggregate efficiency decreases. Counterfactual analysis indicates that reducing financial barriers in the United States raises income per capita by 13 percent but slightly reduces the entrepreneurship rate, increases income inequality, and lowers intergenerational mobility, highlighting the policy trade-off regarding economic development and income concentration.

Chapter 2 examines the relationship between individualism, innovation, and economic development over time. I first revisit the country-level evidence by extending the time scope and including more controls, and find that the impact of individualism is inconsistent across different specifications, especially when I control for institutions. To address the limitations of time-invariant cultural proxies at the country level, I construct time-varying, ancestry-based measures of individualism within the United States, include local fixed effects to control for institutional differences, and use IV strategies to address endogeneity. The results suggest that individualism has either no statistically significant effect or a negative effect on innovation and economic development, in contrast to prevailing findings in the literature.

Overall, the dissertation emphasizes that both resource allocation and the transmission of cultural values across generations can influence long-run inequality and economic development.

Degree Date

Spring 2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Economics

Advisor

Ömer Özak

Second Advisor

Michael Sposi

Third Advisor

Rocío Madera

Fourth Advisor

Enrique Martínez García

Number of Pages

121

Format

.pdf

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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