| Summary: | This thesis provides an empirical analysis of the following three economic issues: (i) the relationship between financial markets deepening and income inequality; (ii) the . association of consumption insurance with the distribution of income and consumption; and (iii) the effects of women's education on husbands' income and labour market participation. The first issue is addressed in chapter two, where I employ a cross-sectional empirical analysis of a number of countries. The peculiarity here is the use of "new" financial market variables that proxy for access to financial services and for credit constraints. Estimation results show negative and significant regression coefficients for both variables. If this outcome is expected for the indicator of access, it is not for th~ other one. I speculate this is due the fact that the underlying indicator affects only the richer. The second issue is analysed in chapter three. Here a mixture of normal distributions to is used to model UK's household income data in a semi-parametric way; the model's fitting looks reasonably good. This approach is also used to simulate the distribution of consumption under the extreme hypotheses of full smoothing and no smoothing, which are, in turn, compared with actual consumption. Results show a sizable degree of smoothing across household.
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