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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

And look up your own hometown at www.taxbasefragmentation.net!

Tax base fragmentation in Ann Arbor. Ypsilanti has a lower than average tax base per capita, while Barton Hills has a far higher tax base than average.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

And metro-level stats on the overall level of tax base fragmentation

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

@nerd4cities.bsky.social Video suggestion: the top 10 most egregious municipal tax havens in the United States www.taxbasefragmentation.net

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

If we look just at the proposed *cuts* to Medicaid and SNAP, it's the economic equivalent of Maine losing its entire forestry and paper manufacturing industries, all at once--or Alaska losing 60% of its oil and gas industry.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Put another way, Medicaid contributes roughly as much to Detroit's economy than car manufacturing, more to Houston than the chemical industry, almost twice as much to Los Angeles as motion picture production--these are big numbers!

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

In some parts of Florida--looking at you, Cape Coral--traditional traded industries make up just *5 percent* of the economic base. The rest of the economy is based on retirement savings, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, etc.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

I compute the share of *all* economic base income that comes from transfers, financial income, and earnings in traded industries (the standard definition). The results are pretty striking: in 2022, transfer payments accounted for *40 percent* of the economic base across US regions

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Usually, researchers define the economic base = traded industries only. But selling products to other cities or countries isn't the only way money can enter a local economy. I explore two other sources: financial income and government transfers. Like exports, these payments sustain the local sector

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Other industries--some examples are restaurants, grocery stores, home construction, mechanics--serve local, not national/global demand. These are the "town fillers," now usually called the "local" or "non-basic" sector

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Basically, some industries--think manufacturing, farming, etc., but also film production or high finance--sell their products on national or global markets, bringing money into their local economies. They're the "town builders", which modern scholars call "traded industries" or the "basic sector"

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

The starting point is Economic Base Theory--a classic concept in economics and geography going back at least to Werner Sombart's 1916 classic "Der moderne Kapitalismus", which made the distinction between "town builders" and "town fillers"

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Moreover, if you control for wealth-to-income in a regression, then you see a strong, *positive* relationship between wealth and income inequality. This suggests that maybe Norway and Denmark really are more equal than the US, they just manifest it in different ways

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

But there's a strong *negative* relationship between wealth inequality and wealth-to-income: countries with greater inequality also have less total wealth, relative to the size of their economies. And it's a lot less: (low inequality) Italy has 3x as much wealth per dollar of income as Sweden does

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Using @lisdata.bsky.social data, I plot wealth inequality against income inequality and the wealth-to-income ratio: how much wealth a country has, relative to the size of its economy. As expected, there's minimal relationship between the Gini index for marketable wealth and that for income

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

But if wealth and social insurance programs can be (partial) substitutes, it starts to make sense. Fessler and @martinviktor.bsky.social show in countries with larger welfare states, people accumulate less private savings--especially poorer residents www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

The US has high inequality in both, but places like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have high (marketable) wealth inequality despite very low income inequality

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Thinking hard about augmented wealth also illuminates a major puzzle in wealth inequality research. As @mjantti.bsky.social @esiermin.bsky.social @fabianpfeffer.bsky.social @norawaitkus.bsky.social (+ more) have shown, there's minimal correlation across countries between wealth and income inequality

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Programs to support new parents are also important: paid parental leave + child allowances have a discounted value of about $70k per child in Norway, and $40k in the US. The raw numbers are smaller than pensions, but as a fraction of a 30-year-old's savings, they're comparable

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

But other types of social insurance are also massive, especially in Norway. For the median worker, unemployment insurance + paid sick leave are worth almost $60,000 in Norway--but just $1200 in the US

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

In both countries, public retirement assets are enormous: worth $100,000s per person, comparable to the marketable net worth of the median retiree

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

So far, most augmented wealth research has focused on pensions. But if we dig deeper, we see that other types of social insurance are also major sources of wealth for many people. I explore this in Norway and the USA

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

By matching wealth definitions to specific uses, researchers can avoid talking past each other and make progress towards building shared understanding. I give some recommendations

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

If you're studying readiness for retirement, then not including Social Security as a form of wealth is fundamentally misleading. But if you're studying the ability to meet an unexpected financial shock—or the way wealth influences politics—then you probably shouldn't include it

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Which definition you use matters: as @mwronski.bsky.social and others have shown, in many countries, pensions are worth more than all *marketable wealth combined*. And inequality in augmented wealth is much lower than in marketable wealth doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Most research defines “marketable wealth” as easily tradeable assets—like cash, stocks, and real estate. But some—going all the way back to Milton Friedman—argue we should include pensions and social benefits too. This is called "augmented wealth."

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

I have a new paper out! "Should Social Insurance Programs Count as Wealth? Augmented Wealth in Research and Policy." Published yesterday in Socio-Economic Review @sasemeeting.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/ser/...

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

To dig deeper into regional industries, you can download our full categorization of NAICS 6-digit industries from my website robertmanduca.com/publications/

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

They're also important spaces for entrepreneurship: there are 3x as many privately held companies in regional industries as in traded ones, and average sales are 2x local industries

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Moreover, jobs in regional industries pay well: average earnings were $70k, almost as high as traded industries and 75% more than local industries.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Regional industries are massive: they accounted for 30% of US employment in 2017--36 million jobs, almost twice as many as traded industries. And they’re growing fast: employment in regional industries grew by 21% from 2001 to 2021, compared to 12% in the rest of the economy

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Quintessential regional industries are support activities for other businesses: facilities maintenance, logistics, printing services. Construction and some kinds of manufacturing (craft beer, for example) are also prominent.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

You see the same pattern across lots of industries: if you look simultaneously at metro and county-level Location Quotients, they fall into 3 main groups: high/high (Local industries), low/low (Traded), and high/low (Regional).

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Compare that to the maps for auto manufacturing above, or to these maps of grocery stores, a true local industry. At the metro level, Grocery Wholesalers look like local industries. But at the county level, they look like traded ones

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

But at the *county* level, you see much more spatial concentration: in most metros, grocery wholesalers are concentrated into 1-2 districts, from which they supply the whole metropolitan area

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

For example, here are maps showing the spatial profile of Grocery Wholesalers, a regional industry. At the metro scale, wholesalers have a moderate presence pretty much everywhere. That makes sense--food distribution is a universal need

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Local and traded industries play different roles in metropolitan economies: traded industries bring money into the metro from the outside, while local industries provide the bulk of employment.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Because they serve global markets, traded industries tend to be spatially concentrated. This map of auto manufacturing, for example, shows how it has a major presence in about 10 US metros, a minor presence in 15 or so more, and no presence at all in most metros

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

“Traded” industries, on the other hand, serve customers around the country or the globe: cars from Detroit, movies from Hollywood, pharmaceuticals from Boston.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

For decades, planners, geographers, and economists have categorized industries by the geographic areas they serve. "Local" industries serve nearby customers. They include grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations, etc. Local industries are present pretty much everywhere to some level.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 31/07/2024

To wrap up, there’s a longstanding debate over whether “people-based” or “place-based” policies are most effective. We show that transfer programs can synthesize these approaches: they’re available everywhere, but still disproportionately go to the places that need them most.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 31/07/2024

We estimate that the geographic effect would be pretty big: overall inequality would drop by another percentage point, comparable to the reduction from veterans' benefits and larger than any other program except retirement benefits

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 31/07/2024

What these programs have in common is that they are federally administered, with minimal state control over eligibility or benefits. But their recipients are disproportionately concentrated in low-income parts of country

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 31/07/2024

But if you adjust for the level of spending, veterans' benefits have the largest effect, followed by SNAP and the EITC.

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 31/07/2024

What’s interesting is that there’s a lot of variation in the geographic effects of different transfer programs. Overall, retirement benefits have by far the largest impact, which makes sense given that they amount to more than $1,000,000,000,000 in annual spending

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 31/07/2024

And this means that geographic inequality is post-transfer incomes is lower than that in pre-transfer incomes. In 2019, transfers reduced geographic inequality by 12%—equivalent to reversing 28% of the rise in pre-transfer inequality since the 1970s

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 31/07/2024

It turns out they do. Transfer spending is negatively correlated across metros with per capita income: poorer places receive more transfer spending, on average

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 31/07/2024

Since the 1970s, income gaps between regions of the US have widened. In 2019, per capita income in Jackson, Wyoming, was $163,000--more than 10x the level in Buffalo County, SD. Even among large metros, Bridgeport, CT had an income of $116k per capita, vs $23k in McAllen, TX

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 28/03/2024

There's a lot more in the paper--a bunch on specification choices, plus decomposition methods and more on approximation methods. Check it out!

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 28/03/2024

We also show that using one year of income data is probably enough--unlike for relative mobility, where averaging across many years is important for reducing bias

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Robert Manduca @robertmanduca.bsky.social · 28/03/2024

A second methods piece is that we look at sensitivity to the age and number of years in which income is measured. Absolute mobility rates stabilize around age 35 across our sample countries (*not* age 30, which is when most studies--including our own--have measured income

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