Fiscal centralization and spatial inequality in economic mobility in the U.S.

Variation in government spending is a key driver of spatial inequality in social outcomes, including economic mobility. Yet beyond spending levels, the fiscal centralization of subnational governments—i.e., the relative role of higher versus lower-level governments in taxing, spending, and public employment—also differs substantially, traceable to place-specific founding circumstances and path dependent historical trajectories. In this study we ask: is there less spatial inequality in more centralized fiscal systems? We use our findings to motivate the fiscal sociology of place as a framework for revealing how historically conditioned fiscal systems are implicated in the production of place-based inequalities, with the potential to generate new insights and policy interventions.