Is local government fragmentation good or bad for cities? These indices will help inform the debate.

Metropolitan areas in the US often contain many local governments, which can work collaboratively or against each other’s interests. Rebecca Hendrick and Yu Shi create a number of indices to measure this local government fragmentation in metropolitan areas. These include indices of how population is sorted on educational racial, income and poverty lines, local government fiscal responsibility, and the impact of sales tax revenues on local government finances. They find that the population index of fragmentation is correlated with population sorting and segregation along social and demographic lines.