Nationally Ahead, Locally Behind: Geographic Scale and the Asian American Income (Dis)advantage

  • RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
  • June 2026,
  • 12
  • (3)
  • 28-49;
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2026.12.3.02

Abstract

Most estimates of Asian–White inequality are calculated at the national level. We show that measures of Asian–White inequality are sensitive to the geographic scale at which they are calculated. Nationally, Asian Americans earn 107 percent of the median income of non-Hispanic White people, consistent with previous research documenting high average levels of socioeconomic attainment among Asians. However, compared to the non-Hispanic White residents of their own metropolitan areas, Asian Americans on average earn only 88 percent as much. The discrepancy between inequality estimated nationally and locally holds across most education, nativity, and national origin groups and is not accounted for by regional variation in cost of living. Examining inequality patterns at both national and local levels helps reconcile the apparent contradictions—socioeconomic achievement along with racialized exclusion and marginalization—that have emerged in previous research on Asian–White inequality. Although Asian Americans have achieved a great deal of socioeconomic success, they continue to face substantial inequality when compared to the White residents of the metropolitan areas where they live.

Scholarship on the social circumstances of Asian Americans has produced a tension. On the one hand, Asian Americans attain high levels of socioeconomic success, characterized by high levels of educational attainment and earnings, and have made substantial progress on traditional markers of immigrant incorporation, including high rates of intermarriage and lower levels of residential segregation compared to other large ethnoracial groups in the United States (Sakamoto et al. 2009). On the other hand, the lived experiences of many Asian Americans continue to include marginalization and racialized exclusion in many forms, ranging from workplace discrimination to xenophobic violence and rising anti-Asian hate (Shao 2023; Zhang 2023; Lee 2021). This tension has led some scholars to characterize the Asian American experience as an “assimilation paradox” (Lee and Sheng 2024). Even as Asian people in the US reach parity (or surpass) White people on many measures of socioeconomic status, historical and contemporary mechanisms of exclusion contribute to continued experiences of disadvantage.

This article argues that this apparent tension derives in part from the geographic scale at which inequality is measured. Measuring inequality at both the national and metropolitan scales, we show that the size and even the direction of the income gap between Asian Americans and White people depend fundamentally on the geographic scale of comparison. Compared to the US-born, non-Hispanic White population nationally, Asian Americans earn more, with a median family income 107 percent as large as the median White family income. But compared to the White residents of their own metro areas, Asian Americans earn less—just 88 percent as much, on average. More than 90 percent of Asian Americans live in metro areas where the median Asian family earns less than the median White family. This national–local divergence is present within virtually all educational, nativity, and national origin subgroups, and is distinct from the effect of adjusting for cost of living. Even among US-born Asians with a bachelor’s degree, who previous research shows have come closest to labor market parity with White Americans (Kim and Sakamoto 2010; Kim and Zhao 2014), the median Asian American has a family income roughly equal to the median White family nationally, 3 percent smaller after adjusting for cost of living, but 12 percent smaller than the median White family in their metro area.

Our findings suggest that the assimilation paradox may be an ecological fallacy. Asian and White people, on average, tend to live in very different parts of the United States, with Asian people disproportionately living in a small number of high-income metropolitan areas (Wang et al. 2017; Woo 2000, 31). Moreover, as we show, the White residents of these metros are particularly highly selected in terms of education and income levels, being 50 percent more likely to have graduated from college than White residents of the rest of the country—a pattern that is not observed for either Asian Americans or residents of other ethnoracial groups. While the spatial concentration of Asian Americans in high-income metros partially explains their national advantage, the hyper-selection among White residents contributes to the divergence between national measures indicating Asian advantages and local experiences characterized by disadvantage. National estimates present a paradox—socioeconomic assimilation and continued racialized exclusion—while local estimates provide evidence for economic as well as racial disadvantage among Asian people within their individual metropolitan areas.

While both national and local comparisons of income inequality between Asian and White people are meaningful, they highlight different aspects of the Asian American experience. The national comparison is important for emphasizing the greater economic resources that Asian families have access to, on average, relative to White families, and for highlighting the high levels of socioeconomic success that Asian Americans have achieved. But local measures may better reflect the day-to-day experiences of Asian Americans, who might find that national statistics documenting that Asians outearn White people do not conform to their lived realities. The combination of national advantage and local disadvantage may offer one explanation for the apparent tension found in previous research.

BACKGROUND

Although a large body of research has documented high levels of socioeconomic attainment among Asian residents of the United States, the extent to which Asian Americans have achieved true parity with White people is debated. While much of the previous research has found that Asian Americans display economic advantages compared with White people, other studies qualify these findings by breaking out Asian–White economic disparities by education level, or by highlighting heterogeneity among the Asian population. We center the importance of place as an additional explanation of Asian–White inequality in the United States, and argue that measures of local inequality may provide insights into the assimilation paradox among Asian Americans.

National Patterns of Asian–White Socioeconomic Inequality

Previous research has found Asian Americans to have reached parity with or surpassed the socioeconomic status of White Americans across several domains. Asian Americans have consistently been found to have higher average incomes than Whites, or any other major ethnoracial group: They had a median household income of $51,288 in 2016, compared to $47,958 for Whites, $31,082 for African Americans, and $30,400 for Latinos (Kochhar and Cilluffo 2018). Asian Americans also have higher average levels of educational achievement, as typically measured in test scores and grades, as well as higher educational attainment than other ethnoracial groups (Kao 1995; Kao and Thompson 2003; Pew Research Center 2013). This pattern is sufficiently strong that in some school districts Asian students are viewed as academically superior to middle-class White students by staff, parents, and other students (Jiménez and Horowitz 2013; Warikoo 2022).

Yet, findings of Asian American advantages are not unqualified. For example, Asians’ raw income advantage appears to result primarily from the disproportionately high average levels of education among Asian Americans. When comparing individuals with the same level of education, studies have found that Asian Americans earn less than Whites with the same educational attainment (Hirschman and Wong 1984; Zeng and Xie 2004). The overall Asian advantage, then, may result from “over-education” (Hirschman and Wong 1984): To earn the same income as White Americans, Asian Americans must achieve a higher level of education.

High educational attainment among Asian Americans also reflects the hyper-selectivity of Asian immigration (Lee and Zhou 2015; Zhou and Lee 2017). Asian immigrants to the US have greater average educational attainment than the overall populations of both their origin countries and the US itself. Yet inequalities by nativity and place of education emerge. US-born Asian Americans have generally been found to have higher incomes than similarly situated Asian immigrants (Stewart and Dixon 2010), although in some analyses the 1.5 generation—those born abroad but relocated to the US as children—have higher incomes still (Kim and Sakamoto 2010). Zhen Zeng and Yu Xie (2004) also find that Asian immigrants who were educated in the US have similar incomes to US-born Asians and US-born Whites after controlling for education, English language ability, and region of residence.

While there is scholarly agreement that the high educational attainment of Asian Americans, the hyper-selectivity of Asian immigrants to the US, and place of education all contribute to Asian–White income inequality, consensus breaks down beyond these points. Some studies have argued that after accounting for education and nativity there is minimal or no further penalty associated with being Asian per se (Kim and Sakamoto 2010; Wang et al. 2017; Zeng and Xie 2004). Other studies have found that Asian–White disparities persist into the second generation and beyond (Kim and Sakamoto 2014; Kim and Zhao 2014; Stewart and Dixon 2010; Takei et al. 2013).

In part, the lack of definitive consensus reflects the heterogeneity among Asian Americans. There is more internal variation among Asian Americans than among other major ethnoracial groups (Budiman and Ruiz 2021; Vo et al. 2023). One analysis drawing on population-level tax records found that Asian Americans were overrepresented in both the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution and had a higher within-group Gini coefficient than any other ethnoracial group (Akee et al. 2019). Lucas G. Drouhot and Filiz Garip (2021) identify five distinct subgroups of Asian Americans, ranging from the hyper-selected, of whom 67 percent have a college degree and almost half earn more than $100,000 a year, to the vulnerable, 69 percent of whom have less than a high school education and only 3 percent of whom earn at least $100,000. Phoebe Ho and Hyunjoon Park (2026, this issue) show that there is substantial variation across national origin groups in the labor market outcomes of young workers: Among US-born men aged from twenty-five to thirty-nine with at least a bachelor’s degree, Chinese and Indian Americans earn more than similarly educated Whites, on average, while Cambodian and Filipino Americans earn less. Variation extends to other socioeconomic outcomes. For example, the average wealth of Asian Americans at the 90th percentile is over $1.4 million, compared to less than $10,000 at the 20th percentile (Tran 2024). That said, there exists substantial economic heterogeneity among other ethnoracial groups as well, which is less commonly studied (Sakamoto et al. 2009).

Experienced Inequality and the Assimilation Paradox

By many traditional measures of assimilation, Asian Americans appear to be largely incorporated into mainstream US society (Alba and Nee 2003), to the extent that they have been said to challenge the majority–minority paradigm in US race relations (Sakamoto et al. 2009). However, this socioeconomic success has not resulted in equal treatment, and Asian Americans continue to be perceived and treated as racialized others. This combination of socioeconomic success and racialized marginalization has led some scholars to describe Asian Americans as presenting an assimilation paradox (Lee and Sheng 2024) or following a path of “racialized assimilation” (Lee and Kye 2016), in which success by traditional measures of assimilation does not bring full acceptance into American society.

To study this apparent paradox, scholars have proposed adopting a “subject-centered” approach to understand Asian–White inequalities (Lee and Sheng 2024). Such an approach centers the lived experiences of individuals, focusing on their perceptions of belonging and sense of group position rather than aggregate measures of success or attainment. Research taking a subject-centered approach in the study of Asian American experiences has helped illuminate how socioeconomic success coexists with racialized exclusion. For example, research on Asian Americans’ experiences in the workplace shows that despite high levels of occupational attainment, Asian Americans report encountering microaggressions and discrimination from coworkers and being stereotyped as smart and hardworking but unassertive (Sue et al. 2007; Dang et al. 2022; Huang 2021; Yu 2020; Chien et al. 2026, this issue). Importantly, when Asian Americans fail to conform to these stereotypes, they are penalized compared to White coworkers (Berdahl and Min 2012; Lu et al. 2020). While Asian Americans are overrepresented in high-paying occupations, they are underrepresented at the most senior levels—a phenomenon that has been described as a “bamboo ceiling” (Chin 2020; Dang et al. 2022; Gee and Peck 2017; Woo 2000). Clearly, these microlevel dynamics can be consequential for both material and experienced inequality.

Geographic Variation and Asian–White Inequality

This article posits that geographic variation may help resolve the apparent paradox of Asian Americans’ continued experiences of exclusion despite socioeconomic success. Due in large part to historical and contemporary immigration policy, Asian Americans are highly geographically concentrated compared to most other US ethnoracial groups. Early immigrants from Asia arrived primarily to Hawaii and the West Coast, which had tens of thousands of residents of Chinese and Japanese heritage by the turn of the twentieth century (Takaki 2012; Lee 2015). After being largely outlawed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924, immigration from Asia revived following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Post-1965 Asian immigrants have generally moved to traditional destination states in the Northeast and West Coast, though from the 1990s onward they were moving to a wider variety of destinations (Massey and Capoferro 2008). For example, many tech hubs in traditional destinations, such as California and New York, as well as less traditional destinations such as Texas, have seen growing Asian populations in recent years (Warikoo 2022; Jiménez and Horowitz 2019). This history has led the Asian American population to have a very different spatial distribution across the United States from that of the US-born White population. Today, 44 percent of Asian Americans live in the Western US, although Asian populations have grown in other regions in recent decades (Tran 2024).

At a smaller geographic scale, residential choice can be viewed as a mobility strategy for Asian families (Lee et al. 2024). Ties between school attendance boundaries and neighborhoods make residential choices key to class mobility (Lareau and Goyette 2014). Asian families place a particularly high premium on education when deciding where to live, and, as a result, are often drawn to high-income, predominantly White suburbs and Asian “ethnoburbs” with high-performing schools (Lung-Amam 2017; Warikoo 2022). This sometimes comes at a cost: Asian families have higher educational expenditures for their children than families of other ethnoracial groups, and also spend more on housing—likely to gain entry to high-performing school districts (Tian 2023). Some Asian parents have been found to buy or rent smaller houses in desirable districts than they could afford elsewhere, while others coreside with unrelated families or work multiple jobs to afford their mortgages and secure their children’s education (Lung-Amam 2017). Beyond access to high-quality education, suburbs and communities with large Asian populations offer resources like community centers, language schools, ethnic churches, and Asian supermarkets and businesses that allow Asian Americans to maintain ethnic ties and a sense of community among coethnics (Matsumoto 2019).

There is evidence that geography is an important factor shaping Asian–White economic inequality. Previous work using parametric regression models has shown that the size and even the direction of Asian–White earnings disparities are sensitive to the inclusion of geographic control variables for region of the country, state, or metropolitan area: Several studies have found significant disparities when geographic controls are included, but not when they are absent (Kim and Sakamoto 2010; Snipp and Cheung 2016; Stewart and Dixon 2010; Wang et al. 2017; Woo 2000; Kim and Kim 2026, this issue). But this research, while a promising start, has important limitations. First, it has generally suffered from low geographic resolution. Studies typically have either included controls for only broad geographic regions, such as the nine Census divisions (Kim and Sakamoto 2010) or composite state–region categories (Snipp and Cheung 2016, who use a total of seven categories); or else collapsed geographic variation into a handful of metro-level attributes, such as cost of living (Wang et al. 2017) or demographic and industrial composition (Stewart and Dixon 2010). But research on spatial inequality in the United States has shown that, increasingly, economic conditions vary at scales much smaller than census regions or states, with neighboring metropolitan areas—San Jose and Modesto, California, for example, or Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan—sometimes occupying wildly different economic trajectories (Manduca 2019, Kemeny and Storper 2023). Andrew Taeho Kim and ChangHwan Kim (2026, this issue) address this limitation within the parametric framework by including fixed effects for commuting zones, a common way to operationalize metropolitan areas.

Even with the proper geographic resolution, however, parametric studies require simplifying assumptions that may fail to reflect economic reality. Most notably, there are documented interaction effects between individual worker characteristics, such as race, age, or educational attainment, and metropolitan characteristics, such as size, industry composition, or average education level (Glaeser and Resseger 2010; Roca and Puga 2017). These interactions, not typically modeled in parametric studies of Asian–White income disparities, mean that the extent of local inequality may be underestimated by previous research—for instance, if White workers disproportionately benefit from agglomeration economies in large cities, as appears to be the case (Ananat et al. 2018; Buchholz and Storper 2025).

In part, these limitations reflect differences in the basic research question being asked. Most research on Asian–White labor market inequality has sought to determine whether, on average, Asian Americans face discrimination or other forms of disparate treatment in the labor market (Wang et al. 2017). For that question, it may make sense to treat geography as a second-order specification choice, something to be controlled for. Here, we see local Asian–White inequality as an object of interest in itself: a quantitative but subject-centered measure that may provide insight into individuals’ perceptions of group position and how those might vary around the country. For this purpose, a descriptive, nonparametric approach allows us to describe conditions around the country with the greatest fidelity.

The remainder of this article documents that the size and direction of Asian–White income disparities depend fundamentally on which group of White people—the full national population or the White residents of Asian Americans’ own metropolitan areas—is used as the basis for comparison, and argues that this may provide one explanation for the apparent disconnect between Asian American success on numerous metrics of attainment and continued lived experiences of marginalization.

DATA AND METHODS

We explore local patterns of Asian–White income inequality in the United States using data from the 2015–2019 American Community Survey (ACS) five-year estimates, sourced from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (Ruggles et al. 2022). The five-year estimates allow larger sample sizes, which are especially important when studying small geographic regions.1 We supplement these data with the ACS Supplemental Poverty Measures Research Files (US Census Bureau 2025), which include estimates of taxes paid and cash and near-cash transfers received for each individual in the ACS.

We conduct our analysis at the level of Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs), groups of counties that encompass one or more core cities and the surrounding counties from which they draw commuters (Office of Management and Budget 2021). Microdata are matched to CBSAs using the Missouri Census Data Center’s Geographic Correspondence Engine population weights (Missouri Census Data Center 2018). We group “noncore” counties—those that are not included in a CBSA—into one residual observation per state. In the remainder of the article we refer to “CBSAs” and “metros” interchangeably, including the noncore counties.

Variables

Key variables in our study include race and ethnicity and equivalized disposable family income. To analyze differences between the Asian and White populations in the United States, we create ethnoracial categories using individuals’ self-reported racial identities in the ACS. In our primary analysis, we identify “Asian Americans” as only those respondents who identified as Asian alone and who did not identify as Hispanic or Latino.2 For all comparisons, we follow previous research (Kim and Sakamoto 2010; Kim and Zhao 2014; Wang et al. 2017) and define the “White” reference group to include only respondents born in the United States who identified as non-Hispanic White alone.

We measure economic disparities in equivalized disposable family income. In this we differ from most previous research on Asian–White economic disparities, which has typically focused on logged individual earnings or hourly wages among workers alone, generally with the goal of identifying whether Asian Americans face discrimination in the labor market (Kim and Sakamoto 2010; Wang et al. 2017; Zeng and Xie 2004; Ho and Park 2026; Kim and Kim 2026). Disposable family income is well suited to measuring overall standards of living, since it incorporates income received from sources beyond the labor market, net of taxes and transfers (Canberra Group 2011), whereas individual earnings or wages offer a better picture of labor market experiences specifically. We define family income as the sum of all posttax income from any source earned by members of the same family, where family is defined by the Census Bureau as related individuals living in the same household. We then equivalize this measure by dividing by the square root of family size, a common way to account for how expenses scale with the number of people (Smeeding 2016). In supplemental analyses shown in online appendix table A.3, we consider alternate measures of income including household income, family income normalized by family size (rather than its square root), household income normalized by household size (rather than its square root), and pretax measures of family and household income. We also report results using labor market earnings only among employed individuals, employed men, and employed women—a specification that more closely aligns with previous research. Our findings are broadly consistent across all income measures.

Previous research on Asian–White inequality has emphasized the importance of national origin, nativity, and educational attainment. We use the ACS detailed race and ethnicity variables to identify national origin subgroups among Asian Americans. We adopt the following national origin categories: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, other South Asian, Filipino, Vietnamese, other Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, and other Asian. In addition, we include in our subgroup analysis a separate category for those who identify with more than one Asian subgroup, and two groups of multi-racial Asian Americans: those who identify as Asian and White, and those who identify as Asian and another non-White race or as Asian and Hispanic or Latino. We measure education using six categories: less than high school; high school; some college, but no degree; associate’s degree; bachelor’s degree; and advanced degree. To compare our findings with previous work on inequality among bachelor’s degree holders, we also create a “bachelor’s degree plus” education designation that combines the bachelor’s degree and advanced degree categories. For nativity, we identify whether someone was born inside or outside of the United States.

Inequality Measurement

To explore how differing geographic distributions shape Asian–White inequality, we use an approach of nonparametric geographic disaggregation. This involves calculating the same inequality measure simultaneously at two geographic scales: the national and the local. By comparing the national statistic with the (Asian population-weighted) average of the local statistics, we can determine the extent to which the national statistic reflects geographic differences between the comparator groups, in addition to local inequality on the outcome variable (family income in our case). This may occur when two conditions are met: First, the comparator groups have substantially different geographic distributions, and second, the geographic regions where members of each group reside differ systematically on the outcome variable. By not imposing a particular functional form on the interactions between geography, individual characteristics, and labor market characteristics, our nonparametric approach allows us to fully see the magnitude of variation in local inequality between places and between the national and average local statistics. This nonparametric approach serves as a useful complement to parametric approaches, which can seek to identify particular characteristics that contribute to either national or local inequality. For example, Kim and Kim (2026) use a parametric geographic approach to explore the extent to which certain local labor market characteristics contribute to the overall national inequality between Asian and White male workers.

The inequality statistic that we use is the median income ratio: the median family income among Asian Americans divided by that among White people. Ratios above 1 indicate that Asian people have higher incomes on average (an advantage for Asians), while ratios below 1 indicate the opposite (a disadvantage for Asians). Values farther away from 1 indicate greater inequality between Asian and White people. National ratios compare the median income levels of all Asians and Whites in the US. In addition to the raw national ratio, we construct a version of the national ratio in which incomes are adjusted for local cost of living using the Bureau of Economic Analysis regional price parities (US Bureau of Economic Analysis 2024). This accounts for how a given income does not go as far in expensive areas, where Asian Americans disproportionately live (Wang et al. 2017). However, higher costs in some areas may reflect the lifestyle amenities these areas offer (Diamond 2016), in which case adjusting for cost of living would understate the benefits of living there.3 To measure local disparities, we calculate the Asian–White median income ratio for each CBSA individually, and then compute the mean of cross-CBSA income ratios, weighted by the Asian population of each CBSA.4 These calculations allow us to compare three measures of inequality: national inequality, national inequality adjusted for cost of living, and local inequality.

Previous research has shown that nativity, national origin, and education levels are important factors that contribute to Asian–White inequality. There is also considerable geographic variation in these dimensions: almost 70 percent of Japanese Americans, for example, live in the western US, compared with just 27 percent of Indian Americans (Tran 2024). To explore whether the geographic patterns we document reflect geographic variation in these factors, we create measures of national and local inequality for different subgroups defined by nativity, national origin, education, and the intersections of these categories. As with the full population estimates, we provide the national income ratio, the national income ratio adjusted for cost of living, and the mean of local ratios for each subgroup. Finally, while our main results are focused on disparities in median income, we also examine disparities at other points in the income distribution. We calculate national and local inequality at the 10th, 25th, 75th, 90th, and 95th percentiles to provide additional details about Asian–White inequality.

FINDINGS

We find that national and local estimates of Asian–White inequality do indeed diverge. Consistent with previous research, we find that Asians are advantaged nationally. But we find systematic local inequalities: more than 90 percent of Asian Americans live in metros where Asian families have lower median incomes than White families. Asians’ local income disadvantages are distinct from cost-of-living adjustments, and appear to stem in part from the hyper-selected White populations in the areas where Asians are spatially concentrated. These findings hold when adjusting for nativity, national origin, and education level: local inequalities are heterogeneous but typically reflect an Asian disadvantage. Our results reveal that national comparisons of Asian and White Americans, while meaningful, provide an incomplete picture of Asian–White inequality in the United States. Adding local comparisons adds to our understanding of subject-centered inequality by emphasizing Asian Americans’ relative position in the places where they live.

The Geographic Distributions of Asian American and White Populations

Nationally, the median Asian American in our data had a family income of $43,583, 107 percent of the $40,902 median family income among Whites—a small but real income advantage that is consistent with those found in previous research (Sakamoto et al. 2009; Zeng and Xie 2004). After adjusting for cost of living, the median income ratio drops from 107 percent to 97.5 percent, suggesting that higher living costs erode the national Asian income advantage.

Part of the reason that national estimates of inequality are tempered when adjusting for cost of living is that the spatial distribution of Asian Americans across the United States differs markedly from that of White people. Compared to other large ethnoracial groups, Asian Americans are spatially concentrated in just a few major metropolitan areas. Table 1 lists the ten largest metros by total Asian population. Together, these ten metros are home to half of all Asian residents of the United States. For comparison, these ten metros account for about 15 percent of the US White population. White people are much more evenly spread around the country, but to the extent that certain regions have greater White populations, it is regions with very small Asian populations, such as the non-metropolitan Midwest, Appalachia, and northern New England (figures A.1 and A.2 show the spatial distributions of the Asian and White populations of the United States).

View this table:
Table 1.

Demographic and Socioeconomic Characteristics, CBSAs with the Largest Asian American Populations

Importantly, Asian people live in metro areas that are richer than average, while White people live in places slightly poorer than the nation as a whole. On average, the median equivalized family income (for residents of every ethnoracial group combined) in metros where Asian people live was $40,796, about 11 percent higher than that for the country overall. The average median income in the metros where White people live was $36,428, approximately 1 percent lower than the national median.

In fact, the potential disconnect between national statistics and local experience may be larger than it first appears, because it is a very particular subset of White Americans who live in the CBSAs with large Asian populations. As table 1 shows, White residents of these areas have much higher average levels of education than the White population of the US overall: 50.6 percent of White residents of these ten cities have a bachelor’s degree, compared to just 32.9 percent of White residents of the rest of the country. In San Francisco and Washington, DC, the proportions are even higher, at almost 62 percent and 63 percent respectively. The differences in bachelor’s degree attainment are much smaller for Asian residents (55.5 percent versus 51.4 percent) and for residents of other ethnoracial groups (21.0 percent versus 18.5 percent; results displayed in table A.1).

Figure 1 reveals that this is a systematic pattern. It plots the relationship between the proportion of CBSA residents who are Asian American and the fraction of Asian and White residents over twenty-five with a bachelor’s degree. While the relationship between the size of the Asian American population in a CBSA and average educational attainment among Asian Americans is weakly negative (figure 1, panel A; Asian-population-weighted r = −0.21), there is a strong relationship between the size of the Asian American population in a CBSA and the educational attainment of White residents (figure 1, panel B; White-population-weighted r = 0.66). In metros where fewer than 1 percent of the population identifies as Asian American, about 21 percent of Whites have bachelor’s degrees (about 45 percent of Asian Americans in these metros have at least a bachelor’s degree). In metros where more than 10 percent of the population identifies as Asian, 51 percent of the White population has at least a bachelor’s degree—almost exactly equal to the 52 percent share among Asian Americans in these metros. The relationship between education and Asian population share is much weaker for members of other ethnoracial groups (shown in figure A.3; population-weighted r = 0.19). White residents of the places where most Asian Americans live are highly selected in terms of their education level—both compared with the national White population and compared with the non-white population of these metros.

Association Between the Percent of CBSA Residents Identifying as Asian and Share of Different Ethnoracial Groups with a Bachelor’s Degree or More Education Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates, via IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2022).
Figure 1.

Association Between the Percent of CBSA Residents Identifying as Asian and Share of Different Ethnoracial Groups with a Bachelor’s Degree or More Education

Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates, via IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2022).

In this article, we do not take a strong stance on the origins or causal direction of the positive relationship between Asian American population size and education levels for White residents. It could be that Asian Americans, with their high average levels of education, disproportionately end up living in metros that furnish many jobs for educated workers in general, and therefore attract educated White residents as well. It could be that, by historical chance, US immigration policy funneled Asian Americans disproportionately to cities that would later become human capital hubs. Or it could be that Asians contribute to the prosperity of these regional economies with their disproportionate levels of human capital. Most likely, more than one of these explanations is operating. No matter the cause, the result is the same: the White people most Asian Americans encounter—who are likely to play an especially strong role in forming their ideas of relative group position—are a highly selected subgroup, both compared with the US White population in general and compared with the average resident of these cities. This may create a disconnect between national-level statistics and local lived experience.

Divergence Between National and Local Statistics

The previous section documented how Asian Americans and White people tend to live in different parts of the country, with Asians disproportionately concentrated in high-income metros. It also showed that the White people who live in areas with large Asian populations are a highly selected subgroup, with much higher average education and income levels than either the national White population or the full population of those metros. This translates to high levels of local inequality experienced by Asian Americans: despite earning 7 percent more than White people nationally, Asian Americans earn an average of 12 percent less than White residents of their metropolitan areas. Distinguishing between national and local measures alters the estimated inequality level by almost 20 percentage points. This effect is not simply a measure of cost of living: the national ratio after adjusting for cost of living is 97.5 percent, meaning that a further 10 percentage points are unaccounted for by cost-of-living adjustments.

Figure 2 plots the local Asian–White median income ratio against the CBSA median income for all ethnoracial groups combined. Previous research has noted that Asian Americans earn less than White residents of certain large metro areas (Huang 2021; Woo 2000, 31). Figure 2 shows that these cases are not outliers, nor are they balanced out by other parts of the country where Asian Americans outearn Whites. In total, a full 91 percent of Asian Americans live in CBSAs where the median family income among Asians is lower than that among White residents.

Relationship Between CBSA Median Income for All Residents and the Local Median Income Ratio Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates, via IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2022). Note: A ratio of 100 percent indicates income equality between Asian and White people. CBSAs with over 150,000 Asian residents are labeled.
Figure 2.

Relationship Between CBSA Median Income for All Residents and the Local Median Income Ratio

Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates, via IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2022).

Note: A ratio of 100 percent indicates income equality between Asian and White people. CBSAs with over 150,000 Asian residents are labeled.

There is some geographic heterogeneity in local income ratios: as reported in the last column of table 1, Asian residents of San Jose earn 93.5 percent as much as White residents, while those in New York earn just 76.7 percent as much. Figure A.4 maps local median income ratios for CBSAs with more than 20,000 Asian American residents. The greatest local income disparities are found in California and the Northeastern states, as well as parts of the Midwest, while Asian advantages are found primarily in midsize Southern and Midwestern metros. Figure 2 indicates a slight negative relationship (Asian-population-weighted r = −0.10) between CBSA median income for all groups combined and the local median income ratio: richer metros tend to have slightly larger income disadvantages for Asian residents. Still, the broad takeaway is one of consistent disadvantage across most places where large numbers of Asian Americans live.

Notably, the income disadvantage in virtually every metro with a large Asian American population comes without any adjustment for individual-level characteristics, including nativity status, national origin, or education level. In contrast to previous studies, which find that the national Asian advantage lessens only after adjusting for key characteristics (Hirschman and Wong 1984; Kim and Sakamoto 2010; Zeng and Xie 2004), we find an income penalty for Asian Americans relative to White residents of most metro areas prior to any further adjustments. Most previous studies have included geographic controls only in models that also control for individual covariates, but Matthew C. Snipp and Sin Yi Cheung (2016), who do estimate unconditional local income gaps, find slight local advantages for male and female Asian workers until individual covariates are also included. Notably, Kim and Kim (2026), who show unconditional local earnings gaps for employed men in figure 1B of their article, also find stark local inequality in Asian population centers such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, though they show, if anything. even more heterogeneity in local disparities across less-populated metros. The combination of our findings with Kim and Kim’s (2026) suggests that when comparing the experiences of Asian and White Americans, operationalizing geography using census regions or states is insufficiently specific. In table A.3 we show that results using individual earnings by sex for employed persons, which more closely match the income definitions used in previous research, align closely with our baseline results, suggesting that the difference is not due to the income measure used.

While our main results focus on comparisons at the median, we show in tables A.6 and A.7 that the divergence between national and local inequality holds across the income distribution. At the 10th percentile, Asians are slightly disadvantaged nationally, but the average local Asian–White income ratio is 13 percentage points smaller, indicating greater disadvantage at the local level. At the 75th, 90th, and 95th percentiles, the divergence between national and mean local income ratios is over 20 percentage points, with national advantages coinciding with local disadvantages. Again, these divergences are not driven solely by cost of living. Adjusting for cost of living depresses the national ratios toward 1, but does not result in the notable disadvantages for Asian Americans that the local ratios indicate.

Local Inequality Persists Across Education, Nativity, and National Origin Subgroups

Previous research has demonstrated that Asian American income advantages compared with Whites are often reduced after accounting for high education levels among Asians, nativity status and immigration recency, internal heterogeneity among Asian Americans, and the fact that Asians tend to live in more expensive parts of the country (Hirschman and Wong 1984; Zeng and Xie 2004; Kim and Sakamoto 2010; Sakamoto et al. 2022; Shao 2023; Wang et al. 2017; Kochhar and Cilluffo 2018; Vo et al. 2023). These factors all provide important context for the unadjusted national statistics showing that Asian people tend to have higher incomes than White people, on average. But they are distinct from the phenomenon of national–local inequality divergence that we document here. Figures 3 and 4 examine some of the most prominent mechanisms thought to shape Asian–White inequality, and show that the national–local divergence in inequality persists even after accounting for these factors. Table A.2 presents these results numerically.

Asian-White Median Income Ratios at the National and Local Levels for the Full Population and for Nativity and Education Subgroups Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates, via IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2022). Note: National estimates adjusted for cost of living are presented.
Figure 3.

Asian-White Median Income Ratios at the National and Local Levels for the Full Population and for Nativity and Education Subgroups

Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates, via IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2022).

Note: National estimates adjusted for cost of living are presented.

Asian–White Median Income Ratios at the National and Local Levels for the Full Population and for Specific Asian Subgroups Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates, via IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2022). Note: National estimates adjusted for cost of living are presented. SE = Southeast.
Figure 4.

Asian–White Median Income Ratios at the National and Local Levels for the Full Population and for Specific Asian Subgroups

Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey five-year estimates, via IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2022).

Note: National estimates adjusted for cost of living are presented. SE = Southeast.

Figure 3 examines Asian–White income disparities by nativity status and education level. It shows that both US-born and foreign-born Asians have income advantages nationally, but earn median incomes 7–14 percent lower than their local White counterparts. Nationally, the Asian income advantage disappears when comparing Asian and White people of the same education level, consistent with previous research on the over-education hypothesis. But locally, Asian people earn substantially less than White people at each education level. For instance, Asian Americans with a bachelor’s degree have incomes 97 percent as large as those of White people with the same degree nationally. After adjusting for cost of living, the ratio falls to 90 percent. But compared to White residents with a bachelor’s degree in their own metropolitan areas, Asian residents earn just 86 percent as much.5 If we combine education and nativity, as research on labor market disparities has convincingly argued is necessary to distinguish outcomes for Asian Americans per se from those due to immigrant status or education level (Kim and Sakamoto 2010), we again see the same pattern: even among US-born Asian Americans who hold bachelor’s degrees or advanced degrees, the national statistics look much more advantageous than the local statistics (which nonetheless still come close to parity with US-born Whites of the same educational levels—see table A.4).6

Another important feature of the Asian American population is its internal heterogeneity, which is greater than that of other large ethnoracial groups (Budiman and Ruiz 2021; Vo et al. 2023; Ho and Park 2026). A third-generation Chinese American living in Washington, DC may have a very different economic and social situation than a Hmong refugee living in St. Paul. This heterogeneity is a critical factor to keep in mind when attempting to study the socioeconomic attainment of Asian Americans. But it does not account for the national–local inequality divergence that we have documented. Figure 4 shows national and local median income ratios for members of thirteen national origin subgroups of Asian Americans, compared with US-born Whites. The figure makes apparent the enormous heterogeneity between Asian Americans of different national origins: Indian Americans earn almost 35 percent more than White people nationally, on average, while Pacific Islander Americans and Southeast Asian Americans with origins outside Vietnam or the Philippines earn 20 percent less—a difference of more than 50 percentage points. Put another way, the income gap between Pacific Islander Americans and Indian Americans is almost exactly the same as that between African Americans and White Americans.

Yet the internal heterogeneity among Asians does not negate the divergence between national and local inequality. As figure 4 shows, the national median income ratio is substantially larger than the local ratio for members of every national origin subgroup. For some groups, the difference is enormous: Chinese Americans earn roughly 5 percent more on average than Whites nationally but earn less than 80 percent as much as White residents of their own metro areas—a difference of more than 25 percentage points. Any attempt to understand the Chinese American experience of assimilation and inequality that does not wrestle with this fact is likely to be incomplete at best.

Figure 4 displays some variation in the extent of the national–local divergence for different subgroups. This difference may reflect differences in the extent to which members of each subgroup live in metros with highly selected White residents. In table A.8, we calculate the correlation between the proportion of residents identifying with individual Asian American subgroups and the share of White residents with a bachelor’s degree (condensing the relationships shown in figure 1 to a single number). The correlation varies from 0.72 for Indian Americans, 0.65 for Korean Americans, and 0.64 for Chinese Americans to 0.19 for other Southeast Asians and just 0.08 for Pacific Islander Americans—suggesting that the geographic concentration in metros with hyper-selected White residents is strongest for the former groups, and consistent with the smaller gaps between national and local statistics for other Southeast Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Americans.

To further investigate heterogeneity, tables A.4 and A.5 present national and local inequality measures for combinations of national origin, nativity, and educational statuses. The inconsistency between national advantage and local disadvantage holds for most combinations of education, national origin, and nativity. On average, across these specifications, the national income ratio is 11 percentage points higher than the ratio comparing Asian people and White people within the same metropolitan areas.

DISCUSSION

Research on the socioeconomic outcomes of Asian Americans has been characterized by seemingly contradictory findings. On the one hand, by most measures of socioeconomic attainment—education level, residential attainment, and to some extent, income—Asian Americans appear to be doing as well or better than US-born Whites. On the other hand, the lived experience of many Asian Americans, even those born in the US and possessing high levels of education, is characterized by discrimination, othering, and barriers to professional advancement (Chin 2020; Huang 2021; Woo 2000). In this article, we have proposed that localized measures of inequality, which capture disparities between Asian and White people in the same metropolitan area, provide insights into this apparent tension. Many measures of Asians’ socioeconomic attainment rely on national comparisons. These comparisons provide important information about the average economic resources available to Asian families. However, most people do not have an intuitive sense of the economic conditions facing others half a continent away. Therefore, localized measures of inequality may better capture individuals’ day-to-day experiences of inequality—along the lines of the subject-centered approach suggested by Jennifer Lee and Dian Sheng (2024).

We show that national and local measures of Asian–White inequality diverge markedly. This divergence between national and local inequality is present within nativity, education, and national origin subgroups, and persists even when the national disparity is adjusted for cost of living. The divergence reflects the higher average incomes of metro areas home to large Asian American populations, driven in part by differences between the White residents of those metro areas and the national White population. For example, although Asian Americans’ education levels are fairly consistent across the country, White people who reside in areas with large Asian populations are much more likely to be highly educated than White residents of the country as a whole or than non-White residents of these metros. Although hyper-selection is most often discussed in the context of Asian immigration, hyper-selection of White residents into the places where Asian Americans live powerfully shapes local inequality dynamics. The result is that national statistics indicating Asian advantages do not necessarily reflect the local inequality that Asian Americans experience.

We believe that the divergence between national and local statistics helps reconcile tensions in the research on Asian–White inequality. While most quantitative studies of Asian–White inequality rely on national-level comparisons, many case studies and qualitative investigations have been conducted using much more localized comparisons: residents of a particular municipality or metropolitan area, or workers in a particular firm, for example. The difference in geographic scale between most quantitative and most qualitative studies may contribute to the disconnect between the apparent economic advantages of Asian Americans and their continued experiences of exclusion, discrimination. and marginalization—what scholars have called an assimilation paradox (Lee and Sheng 2024). Our results indicate that the assimilation paradox may be an ecological fallacy—specifically, an example of Simpson’s paradox, where the relationship within each subgroup (here, each metropolitan area) runs the opposite direction of the relationship at the aggregate level.

Our results underline and help to explain a finding that has emerged in some previous research, that Asian–White wage disparities are sensitive to the inclusion of geographic controls (Kim and Sakamoto 2010, Stewart and Dixon 2010, Wang et al. 2017). We have shown that in a nonparametric, high-geographic-resolution specification, this sensitivity is even larger than apparent in previous results: a swing of almost 20 percentage points for Asian Americans as a whole, and even more for certain national origin groups. But we do not see this national–local divergence simply as a specification challenge. Rather, the treatment of geography when studying Asian–White income disparities raises a fundamental and longstanding question in social research: that of determining the appropriate reference group. The reference group—the group to which people compare themselves when evaluating their own condition and experiences—is a core sociological concept that is key for understanding how people perceive the conditions in which they live (Hyman 1942; Merton and Kitt Rossi 1950; Runciman 1966; Stouffer et al. 1949). However, identifying the relevant reference group(s) in a given situation is a challenging—and often under-discussed—conceptual and analytic task (Merton and Kitt Rossi 1950; Johfre and Freese 2021). In this case, whether Asians perceive themselves as doing better or worse economically than White residents of the US depends on which group of White residents they are using as their reference.

The existence of local inequality does not mean that the national Asian income advantage is not meaningful. Both national and local comparisons contribute important information about the economic status of Asian Americans. The national advantage shows that Asian families, on the whole, do have more economic resources than White families nationwide: On a basic material level, Asians are, on average, better off. In fact, in terms of overall well-being and ability to provide opportunity to the next generation, Asian Americans may benefit more from having relatively low incomes within high-income areas than they would from being higher-income members of more disadvantaged regions. Asians’ residence in high-income regions could even be a mobility strategy to preserve their class status and ensure success for their children, analogous to the way Asian parents spend a larger portion of their budgets on housing to provide their children with access to high-performing schools (Lung-Amam 2017; Warikoo 2022). The local comparison, on the other hand, provides context for continued perceptions of exclusion, discrimination, and marginalization: Compared to the White people they are likely to encounter in their daily lives, Asian Americans continue to have an income disadvantage.

The relevance of both national and local comparisons is illustrated with a straightforward counterfactual question. Given our findings that local Asian–White disparities are smaller, on average, in CBSAs with small Asian American populations, would it be beneficial for Asian residents of major cities to move to these places? Even setting aside the questions of whether such moves would be possible or would prompt local inequality to rise, and whether Asian Americans would be willing to pay an economic cost to remain living near family or large coethnic populations, it is not clear that such a move would be a net benefit. As the final two lines in table 1 show, Asian Americans living in the top ten CBSAs face greater local inequality than Asians living in the rest of the country, earning just 87.4 percent as much as White residents of those CBSAs, compared to 101.3 percent elsewhere. But in absolute terms, Asian residents of the top ten CBSAs have incomes almost $10,000 larger, at the median, than Asian residents of the rest of the country. The greater Asian–White inequality in these large metros may be outweighed by their aggregate income advantage compared to metros with smaller Asian populations.

While local measures help capture lived experiences of inequality, they may also—perhaps counterintuitively—help to refocus discussions of Asian–White inequalities on structural exclusion rather than individual characteristics. National statistics indicating Asian advantages have been mobilized to create racial narratives, such as “model minority” tropes, which ignore racialized disadvantages experienced by Asian Americans and have been deployed to undermine demands from other minority groups to address structural inequalities. Further, gaps between Asian and White people tend to be reduced to individual level explanations: Asians’ advantages are often attributed to cultural emphases on hard work and education or to “Asian American exceptionalism” (Lee and Zhou 2015), while the lack of true parity is often explained by individual level characteristics. For example, conversations and legal cases around Asian disadvantages in college applications are centered on “personality” (Lee 2021), and the bamboo ceiling is often attributed to “un-assertive” tendencies of Asian employees (Sue et al. 2007; Yu 2020). Yet, these narratives ignore that Asian students and workers often have fewer material resources than their White neighbors and peers as a result of structural inequality. Local measures of inequality can bring structural inequalities into focus to challenge individualized explanations of inequality.

A focus away from the national measures also invites more investigation into what drives Asian–White inequality across the United States. While national advantages have been statistically explained in terms of nativity, education, national origin, or place of residence, we show that local inequality persists across all of these categories. If local inequality cannot be accounted for by education, nativity, or national origin, what drives Asian income disadvantages and White income advantages in different places? Our results point to the composition of White residents as one important factor that could be explored more systematically. However, other factors that vary across places, such as industries and occupations, residential segregation, and state and local government policies, may also shed light on why national and local statistics diverge. Kim and Kim (2026) take an important first step in this direction, finding that Asian men tend to have lower relative wages in metros with larger Asian American populations and where a greater fraction of Asian Americans are self-employed. Future research can examine how additional factors, from occupational segregation to mobility strategies to perceptions of different racialized groups, contribute to the levels of local inequality experienced by Asian Americans. Future work might also consider how variation in local economic disparities relates to other dimensions of inequality, such as the rise in anti-Asian hate crime and xenophobic violence (Lee 2021) or levels of employment discrimination and workplace inequality (Shao 2023).

Methodologically, the non-parametric geographic disaggregation approach that we have applied to the context of Asian–White income disparities can also be used more broadly. As geographically labeled microdata have become increasingly available and easier to use, social scientists have devoted more attention to studying geographic variation in various forms of inequality and stratification (VanHeuvelen 2022; Thiede et al. 2025; Lobao et al. 2007; Chetty et al. 2014). The approach we use can help identify other instances where national statistics diverge from the average of local ones. While local levels of any type of inequality can vary dramatically from place to place, national–local divergences are more likely to emerge between groups that have markedly different geographic distributions. For example, a national–local divergence would be more likely to occur for educational inequality than for gender inequality, since the geographic distributions of men and women are fairly similar while those of college and high school graduates are more distinct. Simonetta Longhi (2020) makes use of similar methods in the UK context to show that wage gaps between Whites and minority groups are higher locally than nationally because of the latter’s disproportionate presence in metropolitan London.

As the Asian American population has grown, social research has begun to more extensively study the experiences of Asian Americans, and to explore how the forms of inequality they face do and do not align with those faced by other ethnoracial minority groups. Thus far, much of the literature on Asian–White inequality has taken the form of a debate about whether or not Asian Americans experience inequality, particularly in the labor market. Yet, as studies reveal heterogeneity in socioeconomic attainment and inequality experienced by Asian Americans, asking whether inequality exists may be less productive than investigating how or why racialized inequality continues to shape the lives of both Asian and White people. Although by many measures—including the national median income ratio—Asian Americans have achieved a great deal of socioeconomic success, they continue to face exclusion and discrimination in the United States today. We have shown that they also face a material income disadvantage when compared with the White people they are most likely to encounter—those who reside in the same metropolitan area. Inequality is multifaceted, and true parity remains a work in progress.

FOOTNOTES

  • ↵1. We use the 2015–2019 estimates to avoid combining data from before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • ↵2. Individuals in the US who report being Asian along with another race or along with being Hispanic account for less than 2 percent of the overall population and 18 percent of the population who identify as Asian. Panel D of online appendix table A.3 reports results using a broader definition that includes anyone who identified as Asian, whether or not they also identified as some other race or as Hispanic or Latino. The online appendix for tables A.1 through A.9 and for figures A.1 through A.4 can be found at https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/12/3/28/tab-supplemental.

  • ↵3. The regional price parities are constructed by metropolitan statistical area (MSA), with a residual category for non-metropolitan parts of the US. In total, 97 percent of the Asian population and 81 percent of the White population live in an MSA. In table A.3, we also adjust for price parities at the state level to account for individuals who do not live within MSAs. These analyses yield similar results.

  • ↵4. Calculating the cross-CBSA median of local ratios yields similar results, which are available in tables A.2 and A.3.

  • ↵5. Note that cost of living appears to play a bigger role in the discrepancy within education levels than it does for the full population.

  • ↵6. The most directly comparable prior study is Stewart and Dixon (2010). They find a gross earnings advantage of 2 percent for US-born and a disadvantage of 11 percent for foreign-born Asian American men in random effects regressions with random intercepts for metropolitan area, whereas we find disadvantages of 7 and 14 percent, respectively. Kim and Kim (2026, table 3, model 2) use a parametric approach to control for degree field, demographics, and labor market characteristics in addition to nativity, education, and commuting zone; their results indicate slightly greater disadvantages than we find. These differences most likely reflect either the additional covariates incorporated by Kim and Kim (2026) or other specification differences, such as their use of log earnings with zeros removed.

Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Vol. 12, Issue 3

1 Jun 2026

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    Nationally Ahead, Locally Behind: Geographic Scale and the Asian American Income (Dis)advantage
    • RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
    • Jun 2026,
    • 12
    • (3)
    • 28-49;
    • DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2026.12.3.02

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    Nationally Ahead, Locally Behind: Geographic Scale and the Asian American Income (Dis)advantage
    • RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
    • Jun 2026,
    • 12
    • (3)
    • 28-49;
    • DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2026.12.3.02

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Keywords

Asian Americans, geographic inequality, hyper-selection, income inequality, reference groups, Simpson’s Paradox