Measuring local, salient economic inequality in the UK

Abstract

Neighbourhood-level economic inequality is thought to have important implications for social, political, and economic attitudes and behaviours. However, due to a lack of available data, to date it has been impossible to investigate how inequality varies across neighbourhoods in the UK. In this paper, I develop a novel measure of within-neighbourhood inequality in the UK by exploiting data on housing values for over 26.6 million addresses – nearly the universe of residential properties in the UK. Across two surveys, I demonstrate that housing value inequality is perceptually-salient – what people see around them in terms of housing discrepancies is associated with their beliefs about inequality. This new measure of local, salient inequality represents a powerful tool with which to investigate both the anatomy of local inequality in the UK, as well as its attitudinal and behavioural consequences.