Essays in Inequality

In this dissertation, I study two different sides of inequality. In the first part of this dissertation, I show what the role of unwanted childbirth is on women’s wages and education. I document that on average, mothers whose first childbirth was unwanted have lower levels of education, lower wages, and have their first childbirth at younger ages compared to the rest of the mothers. In the second part of this dissertation, I show how the introduction of a carbon tax affects individuals with different educational attainment. In particular, I show how the carbon tax affects their consumption, but also how the tax reduces air pollution and consequently affects individual mortality. I find that introducing this mortality channel reduces the aggregate welfare cost of a carbon tax by about half. In terms of the distributional effect of the policy, the mortality channel deepens the regressivity of the tax, since the benefits in terms of mortality reductions are similar for all individuals, the valuation of this benefit is higher for more educated individuals.