Abstract: Economic growth is a fascinating subject. It has been under increasingly close examination over the last decade from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. A growing portion of the literature has devoted its attention to the way economies (countries, states, regions, etc.) evolve over time. Many important questions have been brought up and addressed in numerous researches.

This thesis contains three essays on income inequality. The underlying theme is to investigate the relationship of income inequality with political instability, economic growth, and financial development. To this end, the first study aims to explore the relationship of income inequality with political instability. Motivated by the observation that politically unstable countries tend to have wide income gaps, the study explores the possibility that major source of political instability is income inequality, which can be traced back to the history of early development across the globe. Using data for 95 countries, the estimates provide support for the notion that before 1500 CE early development of our ancestors, and after 1500 CE colonization, and evolution of institutions can explain today's income inequality, which subsequently affects political stability of a country. Irrespective of the subsamples used, the results confirm highly significant impact of unequal income distribution on political instability. The second study investigates the endogeneity between income inequality and economic growth, which seems to be impregnable in the literature. Motivated by Spolaore and Wacziarg's (2009) influential idea that genetic distance of population between countries puts barrier to the diffusion of development, this work constructs weighted average growth of other countries as instruments for economic growth that can explain inequality across the countries. The weights come from genetic and geographic distances between two countries. Income growth per capita is instrumented to find growth's impact on the top income shares first, and then the residuals of the regression are used as instruments for the top income shares to identify the net impact of top income shares on economic growth in the subsequent regressions. Using top income data of fourteen OECD countries for around hundred years, the estimates provide support to the view that growth reduces top income shares; however, top income shares in turn enhances economic growth. The third study explores the possibility of financial development as a major determinant of top income shares in the OECD countries. In a century long panel of time series data of top income shares and financial development, the work attempts to capture the impact of financial development on the income distribution of the top income strata. Couple of dynamic models has been used to check the robustness of our hypothesis in favour of financial development as a major source of rise in the top income shares. The results show that a one standard deviation rise in financial development, measured by private credit-GDP ratio, is associated with an increase of the top 1% income shares by around 0.3 standard deviation of its own. The effects are also robust to the other measures of top income shares.

This dissertation, "Three Essays on Population, Income, and Distribution" by Hoi-tak, Philip, Ng, 吳凱特, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled Three Essays on Population, Income, and Distribution submitted by Philip Hoi-Tak Ng for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in June 2006 Over the very long run, population, income and distribution are three very important variables affecting human economic history. This research examines their interrelationship across a long span of history. It is divided into three parts: Part I (Population and Income) In the preindustrial era, income was uniformly low and more evenly dis- tributed among ordinary people compared with the present day. The vicis- situdes of life then manifested themselves in the degree to which population changed. The Classical Growth model or the Malthusian model (CGM) is supposedly the workhorse model when economists try to understand the macrodemographic behavior of this period. But the literature is scattered and unorganized. We contribute by systematically surveying the current lit- erature and by providing a synthesis of different models. Our model encom- passing exercise reveals some interesting underlying behavioral mechanisms, such as the importance of technical change in driving population growth. The predictions from these models are then compared with real global and country-level population data from the past two millennia. We argue that the model which displays roughly constant income level and accelerating popu- lation growth best fits the data. Certain CGM models have achieved some success in this aspect. Part II (Income and Population) Entering the industrial era and the post world war period, the behavior of income and population experienced unprecedented and tremendous changes. For many countries, income embarked on sustained growth and the machine of demographic transition geared up. However there are many variations 1among economies concerning the behavior of income and population. One puzzling issue concerns the pace of population growth decline. The Barro- Becker model is employed to examine this issue and it is found that the model is unable to quantitatively account for the significant drop in popula- tion growth in Taiwan and South Korea. Modifications to the basic model to include technological catch-up are made in an attempt to improve the per- formance of the model. The augmented Barro-Becker model, under plausible parameter values, does improve on the basic Barro-Becker model, especially in fitting the output data. However, there is still room for improvement on its quantitative significance in explaining the pace of demographic transition. Part III (Income and Distribution) As total output or income expands, the distribution of income becomes ever more significant. How are the income growth and the inequality change related? We inspect a mechanism of inequality change which is different from the traditional sectoral shift mechanism of the Inverted-U Hypothesis in this part. Development is inegalitarian because advanced technology adoption is like a queue that favors rich and human-capital-abundant people. Thus higher growth is realized only gradually in an economy. A transitional pe- riod with an increase in inequality will follow. Furthermore, if the growth rate differential induced by technological differences is large, the increase in inequality will be very rapid. Lorenz dominance analysis is used to establish analytical results. Findings show that the above model is able to explain the ph