Browsing by Author "Lu, Sijie"

In the past 10 year, the inequality discourse has been greatly shaped by Piketty’s capital accumulation theory presented in Capital in the 21st Century. Although it has popularized the capital-income dichotomy in inequality research, the missing role of institution has severely restricted the model’s explanatory power. Illuminated by the concept of factor concentration and the decomposition analysis in recent literature, this thesis will analyze the role of one special form of capital -housing- in inequality formation. The omnipresent influence of government (or institution) in housing welfare allocation will be explained. Moreover, it will pay extra attention to the Nordic countries who are arguably featured with high degree of equality and deep state intervention. It will be shown the inequality measured by some indices is surprisingly high in those societies. However, after taking into consideration their welfare regimes the measuring methodologies, the results do not seem so gloomy. The universalistic embodied in their system and a relatively stronger macro level welfare state are not reflected in the data but are effective in defending housing-related welfare. The thesis aims at incorporating welfare states theory and housing economics literature into inequality discourse. It will be demonstrated that the welfare institution in a society has strong effect on shaping wealth and ultimately welfare distribution. Through this empirical discussion, the importance of including qualitative literature in interpretating quantitative results will be emphasized.