Trends in Neighborhood Income Inequality in the U.S.: 1980–2000*

This paper reports evidence on the geographic pattern of income inequality, both within and between neighborhoods, across a sample of 359 U.S. metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2000. The results indicate that overall income inequality within a metro area tends to be driven by variation within neighborhoods, not between them, although we find that between‐neighborhood differences rose dramatically during the 1980s and subsided somewhat during the 1990s. While this trend is similar to what existing research has found, our findings reveal potentially important differences in the magnitudes of the changes depending on whether neighborhoods are defined by block groups or tracts.