Essays in households and inequality Josemaria Larrain

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Larrain, Josemaria, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Economics., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Statistics.

0501.

0510.

0511.

0463.

Local Subjects:

Statistics.

0501.

0510.

0511.

0463.

Genre:

Academic theses

Physical Description:

1 online resource (82 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 87-12B

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2026

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This dissertation studies two related problems in understanding economic inequality: why individuals make systematically different forward-looking decisions, and how these differences persist across generations. Standard explanations emphasize differences in resources, but less attention has been given to the role of heterogeneity in preferences and beliefs, and how these are shaped by family background. In the first chapter, "A Taste for Luxury", I examine the role of heterogeneous taste for luxury goods in occupational sorting and intergenerational mobility. I show that differences in the weight placed on luxury consumption generate differences in the curvature of utility, leading to lower risk aversion and higher intertemporal elasticity of substitution. As a result, individuals with a stronger taste for luxury goods are more likely to select into riskier and more back-loaded occupations with higher expected lifetime income. Using expanded consumption data from the PSID, I document substantial heterogeneity in luxury expenditure shares and show that these shares are strongly correlated between childhood and adulthood. I provide evidence that these patterns arise from persistent preference heterogeneity and from the role of childhood consumption in shaping adult tastes. I then develop a two-generation model in which parental consumption influences children's preferences, which in turn affect occupational choice. Quantitatively, I find that this mechanism accounts for 12.2 percent of the intergenerational correlation of income. The second chapter, "The Healthy Wealthy (or Vice Versa)", studies how individuals form expectations about their own longevity and how these beliefs affect economic behavior. A central challenge in the literature is distinguishing whether wealth improves health or whether individuals who expect to live longer accumulate more wealth. I use parental health and mortality shocks as exogenous variation in expected longevity and show that individuals update their survival beliefs in response, with larger revisions following more informative shocks. These belief changes translate into behavior: individuals increase nondurable, non-health consumption following negative longevity shocks, with larger responses for earlier parental deaths and severe health events. The results suggest that part of the observed relationship between wealth and health reflects endogenous saving responses to expected longevity. Together, the findings show that heterogeneity in preferences and beliefs, and their intergenerational transmission, play a central role in shaping economic behavior and persistent inequality

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-12, Section: B.

Advisors: Krueger, Dirk Committee members: Cole, Harold L.; Nord, Lukas

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2026

Vendor supplied data

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798247973645

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license