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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Political Science

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Doctoral Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

Income Inequality

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Indebted: American Private Debt And Its Political Consequences, Giancarlo Andrew Gonzalez May 2021

Indebted: American Private Debt And Its Political Consequences, Giancarlo Andrew Gonzalez

Doctoral Dissertations

Private debt, also known as consumer debt, has been increasing exponentially over the past eighty years. Largely spurred by private and governmental action, the growth in consumer debt has allowed Americans to purchase services and commodities that they may not otherwise have been able to afford. However, research has also shown that debt has strong adverse effects on human social behavior. This is especially troublesome given how indebted Americans, and in particular poor and minority Americans, have become in recent years. Thus, I ask if the effects of debt extend to political activity as well as social behavior. In this …


Fdi Inflows, Fdi Policy Liberalization, And Income Inequality In East Asia, Yu Yan Aug 2020

Fdi Inflows, Fdi Policy Liberalization, And Income Inequality In East Asia, Yu Yan

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the period 1980 – 2015, foreign direct investment (hereafter FDI) has become more significant in connecting East Asia and the global market. Meanwhile, income inequality has been growing in this region. Although existing literature has achieved noticeable progress in identifying the inequality-inducing effect of FDI inflows both theoretically and empirically, evidence is still inconclusive. This dissertation contributes to the scholarship by providing new time-series evidence from East Asia confirming the inequality-inducing effect of FDI inflows. But this dissertation makes another important contribution by introducing FDI policies to the scholarship. By employing the nested analysis approach, this dissertation sheds light …


Financial Deregulation, Income Inequality, And Partisan Politics From The Great War To The Great Recession, Eric Reed Keller Aug 2015

Financial Deregulation, Income Inequality, And Partisan Politics From The Great War To The Great Recession, Eric Reed Keller

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines how financial deregulation and partisan politics shaped American market-based income distribution from 1914 to 2012 through a process called market conditioning. By using time-series data analysis, I access the effect of legislative and bureaucratic financial deregulation on market-based income concentration for the very wealthy. Then, I use process-tracing to determine why both political parties converged in the 1980s to support financial deregulation. I find financial deregulation does increase market-based income for top income earners, especially the top .01 percent. In addition, I determine that both parties were captured by neoliberal economic ideology and through the bureaucracy, …