The US economy boomed in the 1980s as both employment and real per capita income increased, but the gains from this expansion were distributed unevenly across families, workers, and geographic regions. Current explanations of rising disparities in earnings or income involve changes in labor market conditions, and US metropolitan areas provide a suitable level of geographic scale at which changes in local economic, demographic, and political characteristics can be examined for their effects on income distribution. Recent research on income disparity has concentrated either on regional differences or on national differences between persons and families. Until now, there has been little overlap between these two approaches. The research conducted under this award will quantify both the levels of and changes in the equality of income and earnings distributions within U.S. metropolitan areas for the decade of the 1980s. It will attempt to isolate the effects of industrial structure, population and labor force characteristics, growth rates, unionization levels, and public sector investment on differences in income and earnings within metropolitan areas and on changes between metropolitan areas between 1979 and 1991. Data will come from the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the 1980 and 1990 Censuses of Population, and a series of quantitative models will assess the effects of the various metropolitan areas characteristics on incomes and earnings. The causes of increasing disparities in incomes and earnings remain the subject of intense controversy. This research will advance our understanding of the causes of income inequality across persons and families and by region. The results should be of use to both scholars and policy makers interested in finding out what causes income inequality at local and regional levels.
