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Convergence and Mobility: Personal Income Trends in U.S. Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Regions

Bureau of Business and Economic Research, West Virginia University, Morgantown, ghammond{at}wvu.edu

Eric Thompson

Department of Economics and Bureau of Business Research, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, ethompson2{at}unl.edu

The authors find evidence of income convergence across all substate labor markets in the lower forty-eight U.S. states during the 1969 to 1999 period. However, convergence is not expressed in a uniform way across metropolitan/nonmetropolitan regions, across time periods, or across census regions. The authors show that catching up within the distribution is more common for nonmetropolitan regions than for metropolitan regions. Furthermore, the largest metropolitan regions show strong tendencies to converge toward the bottom of their income distribution while at the same time showing comparatively little distributional mobility. This contrasts with results for the smallest nonmetropolitan regions, which show no evidence of convergence but high levels of intradistributional mobility. The authors also examine the relationship between human capital accumulation and industry mix and subsequent distributional mobility. The results suggest that educational attainment is positively correlated with growth for metropolitan regions, but it appears to be less correlated with upward mobility within the nonmetropolitan distribution.

Key Words: income dynamics • convergence • mobility • modality • metropolitan • nonmetropolitan

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