Three Essays on the Measurement of Socioeconomic Inequalities and Well-Being

The complex transmission mechanism of socioeconomic inequalities takes place in several spheres of life. This Doctoral Thesis, composed of three essays, focuses on the characterisation of some components of inequalities and their spread through social groups. In the three contributions, innovative techniques have been exposed and empirically assessed to extend the literature on the measurement of well-being and the study of social inequalities. The first essay represents a study on teenagers' leisure time activities distribution and how it relates with income and subjective well-being realisations. Taken from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), the information on leisure time activities has been processed with a network-based technique to build a multidimensional index proxying well-being. The second essay presents an evolutionary analysis of cumulative deprivation for the Italian working-age population between 2007 and 2018. A rank-based multidimensional approach is applied for the identification of the cumulatively deprived people. Therefore, an assessment of the statistical multidimensional dependence lying across the identified deprivations is provided following a copula-based technique. The third essay contains a focus on the transmission of health inequality through the socioeconomic background of people. A machine-learning technique is used to derive the population partitioning into social groups and to define the different opportunity backgrounds. Furthermore, the study provides insights regarding the varying effect of individual health-related behaviours on the health status. The 2011 sample of UK Household Longitudinal Study data is used for the empirical application.