Income Inequality and Homicide in the United States

Choices of inequality measure and homicide type may account for mixed findings on the income inequality–homicide link. We aim to acquaint criminologists with several income inequality measures beyond the familiar Gini index and apply the different measures to general and specific homicide rates, noting the practical effect of these choices on results. The income inequality measures differ in their fidelity to relative deprivation ideas, but still correlated highly with each other in data from 208 large U.S. cities. Multivariate analysis also found that all measures of income inequality had significant and positive associations with both overall and specific homicide rates.