Re-examining Regional Income Convergence: A Distributional Approach

Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: We re-examine recent trends in regional income convergence, considering the full distribution of income rather than focusing on the mean. Measuring similarity by comparing each percentile of state distributions to the corresponding percentile of the national distribution, we find that state incomes have become less similar (i.e. they have diverged) within the top 20 percent of the income distribution since 1969. The top percentile alone accounts for more than half of aggregate divergence across states over this period by our measure, and the top five percentiles combine to account for 93 percent. Divergence in top incomes across states appears to be driven largely by changes in top incomes among White people, while top incomes among Black people have experienced relatively little divergence.

Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2023/adrm/ces/CES-WP-23-05.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/misc/appendix_WP_23_05.zip Appendix (application/zip)

Related works:
Working Paper: Re-examining Regional Income Convergence: A Distributional Approach (2023)
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:cen:wpaper:23-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().