Essays on the role of education and the income distribution in emerging economies

The purpose of this research is to construct an understanding of the factors that account for observed distributions. While much of the previous work has focused on developed countries, this dissertation focuses on developing countries and in particular Thailand. There are two essays in this dissertation. First, we develop some facts concerning the distribution of earning, income and wealth from the Thailand data set. Second, we build a framework that can explain and be used to test the importance of some factors in the distributions.;Budria, Diaz-Gimenez, Quadrini and Rios-Rull (2002) have documented facts on the distribution of earnings, income and wealth in US to use in the evaluation of dynamic theories of inequality. The first chapter of this dissertation develops a set of facts on those distributions for Thailand using the 2000 Household Socio-Economic Survey. We find that the distributions for Thailand are not as concentrated as those observed in the US. We find that households in the top of the income distribution are married, middle-aged, more highly educated, and have occupations that derive their income from business and labor sources rather than farm sources. We compared the 2000 Survey with the 1994 Survey. This period covered a major downturn in the Thai economy. The changes that occurred between these surveys did not change the qualitative results from the 2000 survey.;In the second essay, a five-periods overlapping generation model with the following three factors---planned bequest, education and the differences in idiosyncratic earning shocks by the level of education---is constructed to explain the earnings, income and wealth distribution and to test the importance of planned bequest and education factor in those inequalities. We found that the model generates an equilibrium steady-state earning and income distribution that is consistent with the measure of Thailand earning and income inequality. The planned bequest and education are important factors in explaining the inequalities. The absence of the planned bequests seems to produce a more equality of distribution. An education factor creates a more inequality. Finally, the education distribution and the distribution of earnings and income have the positive relationship.