Convergence of Relative State-level Per Capita Incomes in the United States Revisited

In this paper convergence in per capita incomes (personal and disposable) in US states over 1929-2005 is revisited using the notion of relative stochastic convergence and stationarity tests for panel data. According to the results, although the dispersion of per capita income be-came stationary by the early 1960s a large proportion of states have not converged to the na-tional average. The presence of diverging states indicates that a long-run (steady-state) distri-bution in relative incomes has not yet been attained, something which contrasts sharply with the findings of earlier empirical studies on the topic.