Book Description

"Income inequality has increased significantly in more than three quarters of OECD countries over the last few decades (OECD, 2011). This rise in inequality has been particularly pronounced in the United States, and especially so across urban areas where the average metropolitan total income Gini coefficient rose from .45 to .52 over the 1980 to 2010 period. During this time, the increasingly uneven distribution of income reflects the pulling away of high-income earners with the top decile share of income rising from 35% to nearly 50%. Such an increase in inequality has far-reaching effects, undermining political, economic, social and environmental stability. The processes that drive inequality, working simultaneously at the global and local scales, take place in and shape the environment. This thesis examines trends in metropolitan income inequality in the United States and its relationship to environmental inequality by asking two overarching questions: 1) how is income inequality distributed across metropolitan areas in the US and how have these patterns changed over time? and (2) how is metropolitan income inequality related to environmental inequality in the US? The systematic review (Chapter 2) shows that as income inequality has grown, there has been a commensurate growth in the literature, especially since the mid- to late-1990s. Researchers from a multitude of disciplines have sought to further our understanding of income inequality, examining both the (i) causes of and (ii) consequences of rising inequality from a variety of perspectives. Indeed, the review finds that one of the hallmarks of the literature is a growing trend towards interdisciplinary and multidimensional approaches to the study of inequality as roughly half of the top journals publishing work on both the causes and consequences of inequality cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Findings also suggest there is a need for a better understanding of the dynamics of inequality at the metropolitan level.To shed light on these dynamics, this thesis uses the Census Bureau’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) to build a unique large-scale comparative dataset for 226 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the US (Chapter 3). In terms of our understanding of the drivers of metropolitan inequality, modeling results suggest that education has the strongest impact on rising inequality; metropolitan areas with greater educational dispersion typically have higher levels of inequality, while increasing educational differences within metropolitan areas drive internal growth in inequality. Racial segregation is also linked to increasing inter-metropolitan inequality; places with greater levels of segregation are more unequal, and deepening segregation within metropolitan areas increases inequality. On the consequences side, much of the literature has focused its efforts on understanding the health outcomes of inequality. Much less attention has been paid to the potential environmental outcomes of higher inequality, particularly from an inter-metropolitan comparative perspective. To this effect, the panel model results presented in Chapter 4 are mixed. On the one hand, the examination of the long-run inequality-environment connection highlights a positive relationship between environmental degradation and inequality across US cities. On the other hand, short-term models show that while an increase in metropolitan inequality is associated with decreasing degradation, deepening segregation continues to be linked with increasing levels of pollution. These cross-city results lend further support to existing state-level and intra-metropolitan case study findings in the US. Future research should work toward obtaining better quality environmental degradation and pollution data at the metropolitan level in order to better parse out the connections between rising inequality and environmental outcomes"--