How Does Socio-Economic And Demographic Dissimilarity Determine Physical And Virtual Segregation?, Michael Dorman, Tal Svoray, Itai Kloog

Journal of Spatial Information Science

It is established that socio-economic and demographic dissimilarities between populations are determinants of spatial segregation. However, the understanding of how such dissimilarities translate into actual segregation is limited. We propose a novel network-analysis approach to comprehensively study the determinants of communicative and mobility-related spatial segregation, using geo-tagged Twitter data. We constructed weighted spatial networks representing tie strength between geographical areas, then modeled tie formation as a function of socio-economic and demographic dissimilarity between areas. Physical and virtual tie formation were affected by income, age, and race differences, although these effects were smaller by an order of magnitude than the geographical …

The Distributional Effects Of Recent Changes To Maine’S Tax System, Joel Johnson

Maine Policy Review

Both classical economic theory and recent empirical research support the notion that taxes should be progressive: that the wealthiest citizens should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than the middle class, and the middle class should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than the poor. Like every other state in the U.S., Maine’s state and local tax system is not progressive, or even proportional with respect to income, but regressive. This article summarizes recent changes to income, sales, and property taxes that have made Maine’s state and local tax system more regressive.