 Income Inequality and Local Government in the United States, 1970-2000Leah Boustan, Fernando Ferreira, Hernan Winkler and Eric Zolt No 16299, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: The income distribution in many developed countries widened dramatically from 1970 to 2000. Scholars speculate that inequality contributes to a host of social ills by weakening the public sector. In contrast, we find that growing income inequality is associated with an expansion in revenues and expenditures on a wide range of services at the municipal and school district levels in the United States. These results are robust to a number of model specifications, including instrumental variables that deal with the endogeneity of local expenditures. Our results are inconsistent with models that predict heterogeneous societies provide lower levels of public goods. JEL-codes: H7 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published as “The Effect of Rising Income Inequality on Taxa tion and Public Expenditures: Evidence from US Municipalities and School Districts, 1970-2000,” with Fernando Ferreira, Hernan Winkler and Eric Zolt. Review of Economics and Statistics , 95 (2013), 1291–1302. Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:16299 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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