Not all sources of inequality in educational achievements are fair. But how strong and persistent is the burden of unequal opportunities that each person carries on in their life? In this paper, we define individual indices of the burden of circumstances, which measure the effect that the accumulation of factors outside individual control, has on individual educational achievements in the short and long run. As our findings suggest, the effect of these circumstances tends to persist over time. This effect has been particularly strong for the generation of students who experienced the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Lastly, we do not find evidence of a sizeable effect of local non-routine education expenditure on the inequality of opportunity, causing us to question the effectiveness of educational policies in accurately targeting equity.

We reexamine the effect of economic development on the level of democracy based on the data sets of Acemoglu et al. (2008) with a novel regression specification utilizing a zero-one-inflated beta distribution for the response variable democracy. Contrary to the results of Acemoglu et al. (2008), some support of a positive association between income and democracy is found when assuming that the variance of explanatory variables is heterogenous. In particular, our results show that rising income is associated with a higher probability of becoming fully democratic, but income is not generally associated with the mean level of democracy.

but also a very helpful colleague. Also, the student assistants who always be very helpful in anything, including the IT team and in particular Jennifer Phillips for the proofreadings. Moreover, there are lot of people who I discussed with and being helped. To whom that I do not mention by names, please accept my deepest gratitude. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, who have been my strongest inspiration to move forward even in the hardest times.Ultimately, I would like to express my highest gratitude and shukr to Allah SWT who showed me this path to take. What I have learned and experienced is way greater than what I previously expected.Maka nikmat Tuhanmu yang mana yang kamu dustakan? iv Contents Contents v List of Tables vii List of Figures viii List of Abbreviations ix"No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable. " Adam Smith

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in