The upswing in economic inequality that has affected a number of advanced industrial societies in the late 20th century has been particularly conspicuous in the United States. The authors explore its causes using data on the distribution of family income in 3,098 U.S. counties in 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000. The authors build a model of within-county income inequality that assumes that distribution processes involving labor market and sociodemographic variables operate primarily at the county level and those involving the political and institutional context operate primarily at the state level. Multilevel methods are used to distinguish county cross-sectional, state cross-sectional, and longitudinal effects on inequality. The authors find that, when features of the state-level institutional and political context are associated with inequality, these effects are larger longitudinally than cross-sectionally. A range of other factors, including economic development, labor force changes, shifts in the racial/ethnic and gender composition of the labor force, educational expansion, and urbanization are found to have comparatively large effects, both longitudinally and cross-sectionally.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/595943

Changing patterns of income inequality in U.S. counties, 1970-2000.

Florida R. and Mellander C. The geography of inequality: difference and determinants of wage and income inequality across US metros, Regional Studies. This paper examines the geographic variation in wage inequality and income inequality across US metros. The findings indicate that the two are quite different. Wage inequality is closely associated with skills, human capital, technology and metro size, in line with the literature, but these factors are only weakly associated with income inequality. Furthermore, wage inequality explains only 15% of income inequality across metros. Income inequality is more closely associated with unionization, race and poverty. No relationship is found between income inequality and average incomes and only a modest relationship between it and the percentage of high-income households.

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The Geography of Inequality: Difference and Determinants of Wage and Income Inequality across US Metros

Problem of the Century: Racial Stratification in the United States

Urbanization and income inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa

Theories of regional economic development are increasingly focused on understanding the reasons for metropolitan economic growth. The “creative capital” perspective argues that such growth is extre...

Social Diversity and Economic Development in the Metropolis

Many studies have examined family income inequality, but relatively few have delved specifically into the problem of variation in inequality among cities. Moreover, past analyses of the relationship between income inequality and city size are contradictory.' Using SMSA data, the findings by Farbman [5] and Long, Rasmussen, and Haworth [11; 12] suggest that income inequality rises with city size; Danziger [3] concludes that size has no significant effect on inequality; while the findings by Murray [15] and Frech and Burns [7] tend to support the argument that urban growth allows lower income groups to increase their share of income through "legislation, organization, and opportunity." It is clear that the literature is in disagreement with respect to how income inequality varies with city size. Past studies have limited their observations to SMSAs on the basis of the functional nature of their definition as local labor markets bounded by commuting distances.2 However, such analyses overlook many smaller cities that are partially or totally removed from these economic regions. It is reasonable to suspect that employment opportunities and the industrial structure, hitherto important determinants of inequality, will not be ubiquitous over all city sizes. This paper argues that the effects of these differences may be observed more clearly by examining inequality and its determinants over a much broader range of city population sizes. The perspective of this paper is that income inequality will exhibit a "U" shaped trend over increasing city sizes, with smaller and larger cities experiencing the greatest measures of inequality. Our basic premise is that small urban and rural places that are not in proximity to metropolitan areas will offer few benefits of agglomeration. These smaller cities, lacking the employment opportunities provided by larger cities, should exhibit relatively greater

Stephen Nord

Papers

An Empirical Analysis of Income Inequality and City Size