Income Inequality in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Which Areas Have the Greatest Inequality and Why?

In recent years, much focus has been placed on the high and growing level of income inequality in the United States. This composition begins to fill a void in the existing literature by examining specific urban areas that have particularly high levels of inequality and the characteristics that factor into inequality. In this paper, I construct a qualitative model for a particularly unequal metropolitan area. I then apply the model to a set of U.S. metros that are among the most unequal in the country and share a particular set of characteristics consistent with the model