ABSTRACT

The neighborhood inequality (NI) index measures aspects of spatial inequality in the distribution of incomes within a city. It is a population average of the normalized income gap between each individual’s income (observed at a given location in the city) and the incomes of the neighbours located within a certain distance range. The approach overcomes the modifiable areal units problem affecting local inequality measures. This paper provides minimum bounds for the NI index standard error and shows that unbiased estimators can be identified under fairly common hypothesis in spatial statistics. Results from a Monte Carlo study support the relevance of the approximations. Rich income data are then used to infer about trends of NI in Chicago, IL, over the last 35 years.

摘要

邻里不平等 (NI) 指数衡量城市内收入分配中空间不平等的各个方面。它是每个人的收入（在城市中的给定位置观察）与位于一定距离范围内的邻居的收入之间的归一化收入差距的人口平均值。该方法克服了影响局部不平等措施的可修改面积单位问题。本文提供了 NI 指数标准误差的最小界限，并表明可以在空间统计中相当常见的假设下识别无偏估计量。Monte Carlo 研究的结果支持近似值的相关性。然后使用丰富的收入数据来推断过去 35 年伊利诺伊州芝加哥的 NI 趋势。