DONDENA Seminar - Rourke O’Brien

“Fiscal Structures and Inequality of Place”

SPEAKER: Rourke O’Brien (Yale University)

ABSTRACT:

Variation in government spending is a key driver of spatial inequality in social outcomes, including economic mobility. Yet beyond spending levels, the fiscal centralization of subnational governments—i.e., the relative role of higher versus lower-level governments in taxing, spending, and public employment—also differs substantially, traceable to place-specific founding circumstances and path dependent historical trajectories. In this study we ask: is there less spatial inequality in more centralized fiscal systems? We use our findings to motivate the fiscal sociology of place as a framework for revealing how historically conditioned fiscal systems are implicated in the production of place-based inequalities, with the potential to generate new insights and policy interventions. 

BIO:

Rourke O’Brien is Associate Professor of Sociology and of Public Health Policy at Yale University. Rourke is a social demographer of inequality and economic mobility with substantive interests in public finance, household finance and population health. Before coming to Yale, Rourke served on the faculty of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin and before that as a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He received his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University and his BA from Harvard University.

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