New Perspectives on Inequality and Redistribution

This thesis studies how place shapes inequality and redistribution. Its argument is that inequality depends not only on taxes and cash transfers, but also on where public goods are provided and on how housing markets turn access to those goods into prices and wealth. Three chapters, each built on large administrative datasets, investigate one part of this argument.Chapter 1 estimates how much households value locally financed public goods, using Massachusetts' Proposition 2½, which caps municipal property taxes but lets voters lift the cap by referendum. Where a referendum narrowly passes, house prices rise by 2.5 to 4 percent over ten years despite the higher taxes, which implies a willingness to pay of about two dollars per dollar of override-funded spending. School spending rises, but the share of low-income pupils falls: part of the gain is capitalised into prices, and the municipality becomes less affordable.Chapter 2 asks whether public goods still reduce inequality once access to them is measured rather than assumed equal. It geolocates schools, hospitals, train stations and police stations in Belgium and France, computes travel times for nearly 400,000 neighbourhoods, and shows that access rises with income. Allocating the public-goods budget in proportion to access, instead of equally per person, reduces measured inequality much less in Belgium and raises it in France.Chapter 3 measures housing inequality in the United States from assessor and deed records covering close to the universe of dwellings, along three dimensions: value, space and assets. A top-decile dwelling is eight times as valuable and four times as large as a bottom-decile one. Value inequality has risen since 1980 while space inequality has not, so the widening gap lies in the price of location.Together, the chapters show that the incidence of redistribution is spatial: judged by access rather than by spending, public goods redistribute less than budgets suggest, and part of what they deliver is capitalised into house prices.