Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Does Income Inequality Affect The Growth Of U.S. Counties?, Jeremy Roth

Economics Honors Projects

This paper aims to conduct a precise test of the political economy hypothesis linking income inequality and economic growth. By choosing covariates from a detailed county-level dataset and assuming that U.S. counties experience perfect capital mobility, I shut off the four possible channels linking inequality and growth other than political economy. This is a first in an empirical literature that has reported conflicting findings with observations of states and countries. I also present thematic maps to illustrate the cross-county variation in key growth determinants that is masked by state-level studies. My econometric tests find a negative association between the initial …