From John Lindsay to Rudy Giuliani: The Decline of the Local Safety Net?

[...]We consider two puzzles about the local safety netand New York City. First, why do big cities, and particularlyNew York, engage in so much more redistribution thansmall towns? The broad question (the connection betweencities and redistribution) is the topic of the companionpaper to this one (Glaeser, Kahn, and Rappaport 1999). Oursecond puzzle is to understand why the level of redistributionin New York City (and to a certain extent elsewhere)has declined so substantially over the past three decades.We use results from our companion paper to explain thelevel and the trend of New York City’s redistributionpolicies. We need to understand why New York City provideslocal redistribution to seriously evaluate whether thisredistribution will continue to be a feature of New YorkCity life.[...]