The Distribution of Development: Essays on mobility, inequality and social change

The first two chapters in this dissertation deal with innovative methods that aim to further our understanding of social mobility and inequality in developing countries on the basis of commonly available data sources. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive assessment of the adequacy of synthetic panel methods to deliver point estimates of poverty dynamics, and proposes an alternative estimator for a key intermediate parameter. Chapter 2 puts forward an imputation-based method that allows decomposing consumption inequality into their local and spatial components. This procedure is applied to the study of inequality dynamics in India over the first decade of this century. The third chapter takes advantage of a natural experiment to identify the causal impact of improved physical connection to markets on social relations in Indian villages. Improved access to markets leads to fewer social contacts and decreased cooperation within castes. While rural roads do not seem to generally improve relations between castes, they induce a decline in violent attacks, which is likely related to a reduction in casteist incidents.