Janet C. Gornick

In recent years, “inequality” has received an extraordinary amount of attention in political, policy, and academic circles. In the U.S., this attention has been overwhelmingly national in scope. The national focus misses a crucial axis of American inequality, one that has received inadequate attention – that is inequality by geography, specifically inequality across the U.S. states. We assess the role of state governments in social policy provision, directing attention to the consequences of policy decentralization. Using a unique dataset, we examine the magnitude of cross-state variation in the generosity of benefits and the inclusiveness of safety net provisions. We find substantial inequality across states in social provision and conclude that this constitutes a meaningful form of inequ...

Earlier work has established that the US has exceptionally high inequality of disposable household income (i.e., income after accounting for taxes and transfers). There is a debate whether it is due to an unusually high inequality of market (pre-tax-pre-transfer) income or to weak redistribution. In this paper, we look more deeply at market income inequality, focusing on its main component – labor income – across a group of 24 OECD countries. We disaggregate the working-age population into household types, defined by the number and gender of the household’s earners and the partnership and parenting status of its members. We conclude that within-group inequality of labor incomes in the US is, in almost all groups, high by OECD standards. The roots of US inequality exceptionalism are not to ...