Income Inequality and Redistributive Spending: Evidence from Panel Data of Texas Counties

Kwang Bin Bae

Local Government Studies, 2015, vol. 41, issue 5, 735-754

Abstract: The relationship between redistributive spending and income inequality has been of interest to researchers for several decades. Existing literature has largely focused on country-level studies and may be broadly divided into two groups: studies that find a positive relationship between the two and studies that find a negative relationship. The positive association is usually explained through the median voter theory and the negative association through the social insurance theory.This study offers a test of the median voter and social insurance hypotheses by examining the relationship between economic inequality, voter turnout and redistributive spending at the sub-national level among the 50 largest counties in Texas over years 2006 to 2012. One of the advantages of using a regional sample is that counties are relatively more homogeneous and allow for the collection of better records across time. Random effects models suggest that income inequality is positively associated with redistributive spending. The study improves our understanding of the patterns of redistribution at the sub-national level and highlights the importance of careful inter-temporal modelling of relationships between redistributive spending and inequality.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03003930.2015.1020373 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:flgsxx:v:41:y:2015:i:5:p:735-754

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/flgs20

DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2015.1020373

Access Statistics for this article

Local Government Studies is currently edited by Helen Hancock

More articles in Local Government Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().