Metropolitan Income Inequality During the 1980s: The Impact of Urban Development, Industrial Mix, and Family Structure

The empirical analysis in this paper explores the interurban variation in family income distribution. The results point to increasing urban development, rising female-headship, a widening educational distribution, and changes in the industrial and occupational mix as major contributing factors to rising inequality. However, the increase in the relative number of multiple worker families was a significant mitigating force to rising inequality. A decomposition of 1979 and 1989 cross-sectional models revealed that while changes in urban family and industrial characteristics have been sources of rising inequality, there has been significant structural change in the urban models acting to decrease inequality.