TY  - JOUR
AU  - Boustan,Leah Platt
AU  - Ferreira,Fernando
AU  - Winkler,Hernan
AU  - Zolt,Eric
TI  - Income Inequality and Local Government in the United States, 1970-2000
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16299
PY  - 2010
Y2  - August 2010
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16299
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16299.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Leah Platt Boustan
Department of Economics
8283 Bunche Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477
Tel: 310/794-4263
Fax: 310/825-9528
E-Mail: lboustan@econ.ucla.edu

Fernando Ferreira
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
1461 Steinberg - Dietrich Hall
3620 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6302
Tel: 215/898-7181
Fax: 215/573-2220
E-Mail: fferreir@wharton.upenn.edu

Hernan Winkler
UC, Los Angeles
E-Mail: hwinkler@ucla.edu

Eric Zolt
UCLA Law School
Box 951476, 2113 Law Bldg
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1476
E-Mail: zolt@law.ucla.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -