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This paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of multidimensional poverty in the United States over the last decade. It provides estimates of multidimensional poverty over more than a decade, from 2008 to 2019, which covers the Great Recession and the recovery following the recession when major policy changes such as the Affordable Care Act were implemented. For the first time, spatial trends in estimates of multidimensional poverty are also provided. We measure annual poverty levels in 4 regions, 50 states and examine the relation between multidimensional poverty and neighborhood characteristics. We find that on average, 13 percent of the United States population was multidimensional poor. Poverty rates were high in the South and the West and among young adults, immigrants and Hispanics. Alternative indices of multidimensional poverty show consistent trends; multidimensional poverty in the United States rose between 2008 and 2010 and then gradually declined. However, more than a quarter of individuals with incomes above the poverty threshold remained multidimensional poor. This underscores the fact that income does not always capture deprivation experienced by individuals. Policies geared towards affordable housing, health insurance and higher education will help reduce multidimensional poverty in the United States.The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11205-022-02902-z.

This article uses data on a sample of retirees drawn from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine changes in health over the retirement years and to estimate the effects of health changes in retirement on wealth. Using the framework of item response theory, we develop a novel measure of health that makes use of multiple indicators of physical health that are available in the HRS. We find that large negative shocks to the health of male retirees and their spouses are frequent in retirement and that when such shocks do occur, recovery to the preshock level of health is rare. Using a dynamic panel data model, we then estimate short- and long-run effects of changes in health on wealth. While our estimated short-run effects are modest, long-run estimates of the impact of health shocks on wealth are large, ranging from a 12% to 20% reduction in wealth by the 10th year, following a permanent one standard deviation decrease in health.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of multidimensional deprivation in the U.S. since the Great Recession, from 2008 to 2013. We estimate a Multidimensional Deprivation Index by compiling individual level data on several well-being dimensions from the American Community Survey. Our results indicate that the proportion of the population that is multidimensional deprived averages about 15 percent, which exceeds the prevalence of official income poverty. Lack of education, severe housing burden and lack of health insurance were some of the dimensions in which Americans were most deprived in. Though deprivation increased during the recession, it trended towards a decline between 2010 and 2013. Unlike the official and the supplemental poverty measure which did not show any decline, the deprivation index better reflects the economic recovery since the recession. Overall, the prevalence of deprivation was higher in the southern and the western states and among the Asian and the Hispanic population. Importantly, there was not much overlap between individuals who were income poor and those who were multidimensional deprived. In fact, almost 30 % of individuals with incomes slightly above the poverty threshold experienced multiple deprivations. Our analysis underscores the need to look beyond income based poverty statistics in order to fully realize the impact of the recession on individuals’ well-being.

In the tradition of the Policy Studies Review Annual series, Volume Eight continues to offer the best of recent writing and analysis in a number of policy relevant area. Indeed, reflecting the shifting nature of policy debates and public attention, Volume Eight has introduced seven entirely new substantive areas, including such sensitive issues as the viability of the "safety net," information policy, work and labor policy, immigration policy, and environmental policy. The volume is also characterized by explicit attention to two critical aspects of the policy analysis craft--the strengths and weaknesses of various methodological approaches and the role noneconomic factors should play in economic policy analysis. Drawing from such public sector administrators as William Ruckelshaus and Eleanor Chelimsky, academic policy analysts such as Martin Feldstein and Irving Louis horowitz, and two congressional support agencies (CBO and GAO), the volume provides the most timely and relevant assessments of current policy issues. It also provides the reader with a framework within which to approach substantie areas as widely disparate as national security and health care. The volume is an indispensible tool for those who seek to sort through the confusions and contradictions of present policy statements in order to gain a cogent view of how these and other issues are framed and what viable policy options are available., Contents (partial): METHODS FOR POLICY ANALYSIS--S. Rosen, S. Tolchin, D. McCaffrey, J. Hall, P. Dommel, S. Kelman; NONECONOMIC FACTORS IN ECONOMIC POLICY MAKING--A. Etzioni, A. Bhattacharya, J. Fel-dman, M. Fedstein; THE SAFETY NET AS PUBLIC POLICY--Congressional Budget Office, C. Murray, U.S. General Accounting Office, R. Struyk, R.K. Weaver; WORK AND LABOR POLICY--S. Levitan, D. Bresnik, L. Datta; HEALTH POLICY AND COST CONTAINMENT--V. Fuchs, B.B. Torrey, J. Lave; DEFENSE AND NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY--S. Deitchman, H. Brown, R. Art, D. Robertson, J. Steinbruner, I.L. Horowitz, C. Danopoulos; INFORMATION POLICY--E. Chelimsky, L. Perlman, R.J. Perlman, P. Lengyel; ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY--W. Ruckelshaus, M. Kraft, N. Vig, R.C. Kearney, J.J. Stucker, W.K. Viscusi; IMMIGRATION POLICY--R. Mines, P. Martin, E Bean, T. Sullivan, D.G. Papademetriou.

This paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of temporal trends in multidimensional deprivation in the United States. It provides, for the first time, estimates of multidimensional deprivation in the United States for an entire decade, from 2008 to 2017, which covers the Great Recession and the recovery following the recession when major policy changes such as the Affordable Care Act were implemented. We measure annual changes in deprivation levels, across states and among demographic groups by age, gender, income, and race. Multidimensional deprivation is estimated using individual data from the American Community Survey, the largest household survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. We find that about 13.5 percent of the U.S. population was deprived in at least two dimensions. Deprivation was high among individuals having income just above the poverty line, among young adults (aged 18 to 24 years), and among Hispanics and foreign-born individuals. In the midst of the Great Recession, more than 15 percent of population was multidimensionally deprived, but deprivation consistently declined during the recovery period.

L’article trace l’évolution des politiques de lutte contre la pauvreté depuis 1965. Il décrit ensuite, statistiques à l’appui, les effets des politiques de transferts de revenu sur la pauvreté, l’insécurité et l’inégalité économique, puis sur le travail, l’épargne et la famille. Il établit que les politiques de transferts de revenu ont contribué à réduire la pauvreté et les inégalités mais qu’elles n’ont eu qu’un effet palliatif et provisoire. Elles n’ont pas réussi à augmenter la participation des pauvres au marché du travail. Promouvoir une telle participation exige une intervention sur plusieurs fronts : l’éducation, la qualification professionnelle, les politiques de soutien du revenu, etc. Aucune formule simple ou appliquée de façon isolée ne peut avoir d’impact significatif sur le problème. Les auteurs formulent une série de propositions susceptibles de renforcer la lutte contre la pauvreté., This article describes the development of anti-poverty policy since 1965 and attempts to analyse the effects of public income transfers on poverty, economic insecurity and inequality, on the work effort and on savings and family structure. The authors conclude that public income transfers have been able to reduce poverty and economic inequality but that they have an essentially palliative, as opposed to curative effect. They have not had a significant effect on labour market participation by the poor. Securing full participation of the poor in economic life requires a long-run effort and involves improving their employability and expanding education opportunities for their children, changing labour markets, providing social and job-related services, transitional income, employment, and in-kind support, and a growing economy. No simple formula—no single isolated policy measure is likely to make a substantial dent in the extent of the problem. The authors conclude by suggesting some future directions for anti-poverty policy in the U.S., El artículo presenta la evolución de las políticas de las luchas contra la pobreza desde 1965, y describe luego, con el apoyo de estadísticas, los efectos de las políticas de transferencia de ingresos sobre la pobreza, sobre la inseguridad y la desigualdad económicas, y luego sobre el trabajo, el ahorro y la familia. Se establece así que las políticas de transferencia de ingresos han contribuido a reducir la pobreza y las desigualdades, pero que su efecto solo ha sido paliativo y provisorio, ya que no han conseguido aumentar la participación de los pobres en el mercado de trabajo. Promover una tal participación exigiría una intervención que actuara sobre varios frentes a la vez: la educación, la calificación profesional, las políticas de apoyo al ingreso, etc. Ninguna fórmula simple o aplicada aisladamente podrá tener un impacto significativo sobre el problema. Los autores formulan una serie de proposiciones, susceptibles de reforzar la lucha contra la pobreza.

We present a 50-year historical perspective of the nation's antipoverty efforts, describing the evolution of policy during four key periods since 1965. Over this half-century, the initial heavy reliance on cash income support to poor families has eroded; increases in public support came largely in the form of in-kind (e.g., Food Stamps) and tax-related (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit) benefits. Work support and the supplementation of earnings substituted for direct support. These shifts eroded the safety net for the most disadvantaged in American society. Three poverty-related analytical developments are also described. The rise of the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM)—taking account of noncash and tax-related benefits—has corrected some of the serious weaknesses of the official poverty measure (OPM). The SPM measure indicates that the poverty rate has declined over time, rather than being essentially flat as the OPM implies. We also present snapshots of the composition of the poor population in the United States using both the OPM and the SPM, showing progress in reducing poverty overall and among specific socioeconomic subgroups since the beginning of the War on Poverty. Finally, we document the expenditure levels of numerous antipoverty programs that have accompanied the several phases of poverty policy and describe the effect of these efforts on the level of poverty. Although the effectiveness of government antipoverty transfers is debated, our findings indicate that the growth of antipoverty policies has reduced the overall level of poverty, with substantial reductions among the elderly, disabled, and blacks. However, the poverty rates for children, especially those living in single-parent families, and families headed by a low-skill, low-education person, have increased. Rates of deep poverty (families living with less than one-half of the poverty line) for the nonelderly population have not decreased, reflecting both the increasing labor market difficulties faced by the low-skill population and the tilt of means-tested benefits away from the poorest of the poor.

We explore the economic welfare effects of direct and indirect government-induced changes in employment under varying market conditions. We begin with a discussion of those policy-induced employment changes that seamlessly reshuffle workers among jobs in an efficient (i.e., full-employment, full-information) economy; generally such changes create few, if any, net changes in economic welfare not captured in changes in wage bills. We then turn to the effects of policy-induced employment changes in economies with two market distortions: (1) inflexible wages set by law or custom that result in involuntary unemployment during periods of deficient aggregate demand, and (2) illiquidity resulting from imperfect capital markets that prevent people from borrowing against future earnings. Induced employment changes in these circumstances impose real net social costs or generate real net social benefits beyond changes in the wage bill. We also assess the likely magnitude of the social opportunity cost of labor in the case of involuntary unemployment and imperfect liquidity, and address how the welfare effects of such employment changes should be valued. Based on currently available empirical research, we develop estimates of the opportunity costs of hiring or releasing an employee during periods of high unemployment with and without other market distortions. In contrast to conventional benefit-cost analysis practice, which treats releasing workers as having a negative opportunity cost, we estimate an opportunity cost for firing that is positive and equal to about 73% of pre-firing compensation, primarily because of the “scarring effect” of unemployment. Also in contrast to conventional practice, we estimate an opportunity cost for hiring an unemployed worker that is less than the worker’s opportunity cost of time.

We build on cross-national research to examine the relationships underlying estimates of relative intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain using harmonized longitudinal data and focusing on men. We examine several pathways by which parental status is related to offspring status, including education, labor market attachment, occupation, marital status, and health, and perform several sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our results. We decompose differences between the two nations into that part attributable to the strength of the relationship between parental income and the child's characteristics and the labor market return to those child characteristics. We find that the relationships underlying these intergenerational linkages differ in systematic ways between the two nations. In the United States, primarily because of the higher returns to education and skills, the pathway through offspring education is relatively more important than it is in Great Britain; by contrast, in Great Britain the occupation pathway forms the primary channel of intergenerational persistence. © 2013 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.

Drawing on a unique data set that links information on all Wisconsin households receiving means-tested benefits with the educational performance of all Wisconsin public school students in these households, we estimate the effect of a family's initial receipt of housing assistance on students’ subsequent achievement outcomes. We estimate these effects using two different comparison groups. Our first comparison group consists of children living in households that receive housing assistance starting four years after our treatment group—we use observations from those students’ pre-receipt years as the basis for the comparison. Our second comparison group consists of low-income students whose families never received housing assistance, but did receive other forms of means-tested benefits, such as SNAP, TANF, or Medicaid. Overall, our results suggest a positive relationship between housing assistance and math achievement, but the magnitude of this relationship is modest and not consistently statistically significant. We provide evidence that this relationship varies by student race and by type of housing assistance—a voucher or public housing. Throughout, we find little evidence of any relationship between housing assistance and student reading scores.

In this paper we estimate the effect of housing voucher receipt on the composition of recipient households and the quality of the neighborhoods in which recipient households reside. Drawing on a dataset that contains extensive information on a large and diverse panel of low-income families for up to 5 years following voucher receipt, we isolate the effects of voucher receipt using propensity score matching techniques together with regression adjustment. Full-sample results show voucher receipt to have little effect on neighborhood quality in the short-term, but some positive long-term effects. We also find that voucher receipt is tied to a higher probability of change in household composition in the year of voucher receipt, but greater stability in subsequent years. Our large sample allows us to explore differential responses of geographic and socioeconomic subgroups. Our findings have several implications for both research and policy.

The legalization of American Indian casino gaming in the late 1980s allows examination of the relationship between income and health in a quasi-experimental way. Revenue from gaming accrues to individual tribes and has been used both to supplement tribe members’ income and to finance tribal infrastructure. We assembled annual data from 1988–2003 on tribal gaming, health care access (from the Area Resource File), and individual health and socioeconomic characteristics data (from the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System). We use this information within a structural, difference-in-differences framework to study the effect of casino gaming on tribal members’ income, health status, access to health care, and health-related behaviors. Our difference-in-differences framework relies on before-after comparisons among American Indians whose tribe has at some time operated a casino and with-without comparisons between American Indians whose tribe has and those whose tribe has not initiated gaming. Our results provide identified estimates of the positive effect of gaming on American Indian income and on several indicators of American Indian health, health-related behaviors, and access to health care.

Using a propensity score matching approach coupled with difference-in-differences regression analysis, we estimate the effect of housing voucher receipt on the employment and earnings of a large longitudinal sample of low-income families for 6 years following voucher receipt. Our results indicate that voucher receipt has little effect on employment, but a negative effect on earnings. The negative earnings effect is largest in the years immediately following initial receipt, and fades out over time. In addition, we find that the pattern of recipient earnings responses to voucher receipt differs substantially across demographic subgroups. Several robustness tests are run to support the reliability of our findings. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and policy.

We summarize procedures for assessing the benefits and costs of using labor inputs in public projects. Examples are provided to illustrate how information on labor inputs can be analyzed and presented such that, should the analyst choose, labor services generate elements of both benefit and cost in times of high unemployment; however, this is not generally correct in times of full employment. Our analysis is consistent with the overall goal of identifying those projects which are estimated to improve efficiency—those with social benefits in excess of social costs.

This paper provides estimates for a comprehensive set of social benefits and costs associated with the federal Housing Choice Voucher ( Section 8) program. The impact categories for which we provide empirical estimates include the value of the voucher to recipients; additional services and public benefits induced by voucher receipt; improvements in children's health, education, and criminal behaviors; the costs of voucher provision; the labor supply impacts on voucher recipients; and community effects. These estimates rest largely on empirical analyses of the effect of voucher receipt on several recipient and taxpayer behaviors and outcomes that occur in the first year of voucher receipt. The analysis distinguishes benefits and costs accruing to program participants, nonparticipants—including taxpayers and property owners—and society as a whole. Our analysis suggests that the program is likely to meet the efficiency standard of positive net social benefits. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

The employment and earnings effects of the state-oriented federal welfare reform legislation of 1996 have been extensively studied using either survey or administrative data. Because information may differ substantially across these sources, it is difficult both to identify the true effects of these interventions and to compare evaluation estimates of these interventions that rely on these different data sources. This paper uses data gathered as part of the Wisconsin Child Support Demonstration Evaluation to examine the extent to which administrative (unemployment insurance) and survey records on employment and earnings for a sample of low-skilled women are congruent. Our findings suggest that there are substantial differences in both mean earnings and mean employment rates between survey and unemployment insurance (UI) data. We identify the extent to which these disparities can be explained by differences between these data sources in the definition of earnings or the method of data collection. We also examine the differences between UI and survey sources in estimates of employment and earnings growth among low-skilled women.

We hypothesize that teen nonmarital birth events are influenced by adolescent girls’ perceptions of the consequences of their choices. Two such consequences are explored: (1) a teen’s expected future marriage and cohabitation relationships and (2) the present value of expected future income. We also measure the effects of the characteristics of the teen, her prior choices, her family, her neighborhood, and the social and economic environment in which she lives. The results, based on the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics, suggest that teens place greater weight on the relationship consequences than the income consequences, but that both consequences influence their nonmarital birth choices.

Differences in administrative (UI) and survey (S) records on employment and earnings have substantial implications for assessing the impact of a variety of public interventions, such as welfare-to-work and employment training programs, and especially the state-oriented welfare reform legislation of 1996. We use data from the 1998 and 1999 waves of the Child Support Demonstration Evaluation (CSDE) Resident Parent Surveys to explore individual differences between survey and UI employment and earnings reports for a Wisconsin sample of current and former welfare recipients. After exploring the potential causes of misreports from both sources, we document the degree of discrepancy between survey and UI earnings and employment measures and assess the difference between the two earnings measures in estimates of simple human capital (earnings) functions. Last, we evaluate the correspondence of the two measures with “hardship” indicators of economic well-being.

A current policy issue is the extent to which savings are sufficient to sustain economic well-being in retirement. We compare annuitized wealth at retirement to three preretirement consumption estimates. About one-half of new retirees have insufficient resources to enable the full maintenance of estimated preretirement consumption in retirement, and about 40% fail to meet the ‘‘0.7 of earnings’’ standard that is used in many studies. Using standards reflecting social (poverty) norms we find a less serious problem. About 5% (25%) of new retirees have insufficient resources to enable an above-poverty (near-poverty) level of living during retirement. (JEL J14, J26)

I. INTRODUCTION Over the postwar period, the level of education attained by individuals in nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has increased steadily. This is especially true for the United States. (1) In 1950, for example, the average American aged 25 or older had 9.3 years of education; by 2000, this had increased to 12.7 years. This increase reflects sizable increases in the rate of high school completion. In the cohort aged 16-24 in 1960, more than 27% were counted as high school dropouts; by 2001, the proportion of high school dropouts in this age cohort had fallen to 10.7%. Although the proportion of whites in any given age cohort who graduated high school has exceeded that for African Americans over this period, this gap narrowed significantly during the 1970s and 1980s, and by 2000 had nearly closed. (2) Observed trends in and patterns of educational attainment, human capital accumulation, and labor market success are determined by several factors. In addition to changes in a wide variety of background factors (such as ability, motivation, race, and gender), these involve decisions made by governments (as reflected in school resources and macroeconomic performance) and by parents (e.g., parental education, work effort, and child care time). Also relevant are the choices made by adolescents themselves in response to the net economic returns of the options open to them; in this article we explore the schooling choices of youths in response to their perception of these returns. Economic and sociological research on the determinants of the schooling outcomes of youths is extensive and distinguished. (3) These studies focus primarily on the family, neighborhood, and peer group determinants of educational attainments and are largely reduced-form in nature. The role of youth preferences, and the choices made in response to the economic incentives and constraints that young people face, have not been systematically explored in these studies. Hence, their results may attribute to background and family characteristics effects properly attributed to differences in youths' own choices in response to the incentives that they face. (4) In this study, we address the role of youths' own choice-conditioned expectations in understanding their schooling choices by constructing a choice (or "switching") model. We emphasize the effect of individual student perceptions regarding the returns associated with graduating from high school versus dropping out while controlling for an extensive set of family and community factors. Youths are presumed to form their expectations by referring to the outcomes of a slightly older cohort of individuals who have characteristics similar to their own. Because these expected income returns are choice-specific, we require estimates of each youth's choice-conditioned expected returns, taken to be unobserved by the analyst but known by the youth. (5) We focus on the high school graduation outcome for three reasons. First, individuals must complete high school to consider postsecondary schooling options. Hence, the decision to complete high school carries with it an option value benefit. (6) Second, high school completion--the first schooling decision over which adolescents have some control--plays a crucial role in understanding the declining labor market position of low-skilled workers. (7) Finally, our analysis of the high school graduation choice is nested within an extensive economic literature that addresses the determinants of this outcome. By focusing on the role of youth's own expectations, we have neglected other aspects of a complete analysis of the process of educational attainment. For example, we presume that our extensive set of family and neighborhood factors are exogenous to the outcome and independent of unobserved factors. Although we do not explicitly include school characteristics in our estimation, our detailed neighborhood and family variables are likely to accurately proxy for neighborhood school quality. …

American prosperity in the second half of the 1980s together with the booming economy of the 1990s created the impression that American households have done well, particularly in terms of wealth acquisition. In this paper, we develop the concept of “asset poverty” as a measure of economic hardship, distinct from and complementary to the more commonly used concept of “income poverty.” We define a household with insufficient assets to enable it to meet basic needs (as measured by the income poverty line) for a period of three months to be asset poor. The results reveal that in the face of the large growth in overall assets in the U.S. and a fall in standard income poverty over the period from 1983 to 2001, the level of asset poverty increased from 22.4 to 24.5 percent. We also find that asset poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are over twice those for whites; that asset poverty rates fall monotonically with both age and education; that they are much higher for renters than homeowners; and that by family type they range from a low of 5 percent for elderly couples to 71 percent for female single parents.

This paper attempts to quantify how changes in demographic trends have affected the poverty rate in the United States since the start of the "War on Poverty" in the 1960's. The analysis uses both the official Census poverty definition and a supplemental poverty measure that better captures both the resources available to families and their expenditure needs. Using regression estimates to construct a counterfactual, our results reveal that, while some demographic change increase poverty and others decrease poverty, the net effect of the changes in the demographic structure of the U.S. population was to reduce both of these two measures of poverty.

In this paper we estimate a multi-dimensional poverty index (US-MPI) in the United States. Measuring poverty using multiple dimensions of deprivation provides a more complete picture of poverty. The US-MPI measures simultaneous deprivations experienced in multiple dimensions of well-being: health, education, income and housing. We use data on eight different indicators from the American Community Survey, and estimate the US-MPI across different regions, age, gender and race. Our estimates indicate that in 2011, one in five adult American’s were multidimensional poor. Lack of health insurance and severe housing burden were two significant indicators of deprivation.

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 17, pp. 11917–11924, © 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

We use administrative data from Wisconsin to compare employment, earnings, and income outcomes for welfare leavers under early reforms and under the later, more stringent Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. We find substantially higher rates of exit in the later period. Later leavers are somewhat more likely to work, but their earnings are lower. We also make a pre‐post comparison of individual employment and income experiences, examining a leaver’s outcomes during a calendar quarter of welfare receipt with these outcomes a year after leaving welfare. On average, substantial earnings growth is outweighed by declines in benefits, resulting in reduced total measured net income.

In this paper we present a new concept of poverty, Self-Reliant poverty, which is based on the ability of a family, using its own resources, to support a level of consumption in excess of needs. This concept closely parallels the “capability poverty” measure that has been proposed by Amartya Sen. We use this measure to examine the trend and composition of the Self-Reliant poor population from 1975 to 1997. We find that Self-Reliant poverty has increased more rapidly over this period than has official poverty. Families considered to be the most vulnerable—those headed by minorities, single women with children, and individuals with low levels of education—have the highest levels of Self-Reliant poverty. However, these groups have also experienced the smallest increases in poverty. Conversely, families largely thought to be economically secure—those headed by whites, married men with children, and highly educated individuals—have the lowest levels of Self-Reliant poverty, but have experienced the largest increases in poverty. We also find that the Self-Reliant poor is increasingly composed of vulnerable groups relative to the composition of the official poor. The labor market, demographic, and policy sources of the divergent trends in Self-Reliant and official poverty, and of the gender, race and family structure changes in poverty rates are explored.

In this paper, we explore whether behaviors of youths that are likely to result in a teen nonmarital birth event are influenced by their expectations of the net economic benefits or costs associated with the occurrence of such a birth. We posit and find that an increase in the perceived costs associated with the occurrence of a nonmarital birth would lead to a reduction in these risky behaviors, and to a lower probability of a nonmarital birth event. We represent these economic incentives by the income expectations of young women conditional on either giving birth as an unmarried teen or forgoing childbearing while unmarried and an adolescent. We also measure the effects of an extensive list of other factors, including the characteristics of the girl’s family and its choices, the social and economic environment in which she lives (including policy-related factors, such as expenditures by states on family-planning programs and the generosity of Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and her own prior choices.

JONATHAN SCHWABISH [*] From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, several important studies examined the statistical relationship between the U.S. official poverty rate and overall economic performance. Most of these studies focused on the apparent break in this relationship beginning in the late 1970s or early 1980s. In this article, we present the results of our study of the relationship between macroeconomic performance and the poverty rate, using annual time-series data on macroeconomic variables, such as the unemployment rate and per-capita GDP growth from 1959 through 1998. Like these earlier studies, we also find that economic performance had a smaller antipoverty effect during the 1970s and 1980s than it did in earlier years. However, our estimates suggest that the weakened economic growth-poverty relationship may have been an aberration of this period and that the expected relationship of the 1960s has again been reestablished in the 1990s. This is true even after accounting for changes in earnings inequality over the entire period. (JEL E6, 132) I. INTRODUCTION The decade of the 1960s witnessed the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. Since then the economic terrain has not been so smooth. The U.S. economy experienced the oil crises during the 1970s, the long and deep recession of the early 1980s, the long expansion of the late 1980s, the recession of the early 1990s, and the long and sustained growth of the past seven years. Over this entire post-1960 period, the nation's official poverty rate has roughly reflected these changes in economic performance, rising in times of high unemployment and recessions and falling during periods of prosperity (Figure 1). During the 1960s, for example, the nation's poverty rate fell as the economy expanded. In that decade, real GDP grew by almost 50%, the male unemployment rate fell from 6.4% to 2.8%, and the poverty rate dropped from 22.2% in 1960 to 12.1% in 1969. A growing and prosperous economy was believed to be the nation's most effective antipoverty policy instrument, and research studies documented this relationshi p (Aaron 1967); "trickle down" was the conventional wisdom of the time, indicating a belief that we could "grow" ourselves out of poverty. However, beginning in the late 1970s or early 1980s, this seemingly robust relationship between macroeconomic performance and the poverty rate seemed less clear. For example, although real GDP grew by approximately 35% during the 1970s, the poverty rate dropped only slightly--from 12.5% to 11.5%. During the 1980s, the link between economic growth and the poverty rate was even less apparent. Although real GDP grew about 30% over the decade, the poverty rate at the end of the period was no lower than at the beginning. The official poverty rate rose steeply during the recession of the early 1980s and then receded very slowly during the ensuing recovery. The early 1990s saw another steep rise in the poverty rate, accompanying the recession of that period; by 1992 the rate nearly reached the peak of the early 1980s. Since this last recession, the nation has experienced an uninterrupted seven-year run of economic growth. The overall civilian unemployment rate has fallen from 7.5% to less than 5% over the period, and the rate of growth of GDP has averaged over 3% per year. This performance has been reflected in the nation's poverty rate, which fell from nearly 15% in 1992 to about 13% in 1998. II. ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE AND THE POVERTY RATE: RESEARCH EVIDENCE Since the mid-1980s, several important studies have attempted to establish the statistical relationship between the official U.S. poverty rate and overall macroeconomic performance. [1] The earliest of these studies is that by Blank and Blinder (1986), who produced time-series regression estimates using annual observations from 1959 [2] to 1983 with the nation's official poverty rate (for families and for individuals) as the dependent variable. …

The 1996 U.S. welfare reform legislation established the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF represents the ascendance of the view that market work should be substituted for benefit recipiency. We describe the problems inherent in U.S. social welfare policy prior to TANF (emphasizing its serious labor supply disincentives), catalogue the wide variety of economic changes implicit in TANF, and describe the policies undertaken by the state of Wisconsin, a leader in implementing the new federal policy. We conclude by asking if this U.S. reform can serve as a model for other nations.

Increasing earnings inequality among working-age males since the early 1970s has been documented in several studies, some of which have also apportioned the change due to the inequality in wage rates and working time. This study prsents an alternative decomposition using earnings capacity and earnings capacity utilization. We find that increases in the inequality of working time accounts for at least 30 percent and perhaps, as much as 60 percent of the increase in earnings inequality. We also show the sensitivity of measures of earnings inequality and its determinants to the exclusion of jobless males from the estimation. {Copyright 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved}

The original essays in this book have been written by a number of leading international experts in the field of labour market studies to honour the intellectual contribution and lifetime achievement of Gunther Schmid.

Numerous studies of the determinants of children's attainments rely on observations of circumstances and events at age 14 as proxies for information over the entire childhood period. Using 21 years of panel data from the Michigan PSID on 825 children who were 14-16 years old in 1979, we evaluate the effects of using truncated or "window" (e.g., age 14) information in models of the determinants of attainments (e.g., education, nonmarital fertility) of young adults. Correlations between truncated and full-childhood variables are presented, along with 5 tests of the reliability of estimates based on "window" measurements. The tests are designed to evaluate the differential effects of data accuracy, multiple occurrence of events, duration of circumstances, and the timing of events or circumstances during childhood between "window" and full childhood information. We conclude that most of the standard truncated variables serve as weak proxies for multi-year information in such models, and draw the implications of these findings for future data-collection and research.

In Canada, poverty policy and discourse focuses on annual estimates of low income. Assuming that assets, independent from income, represent an alternative view of well-being we introduce an asset-based measurement of poverty for Canada based on (1) financial assets and (2) net worth. A household is "asset poor" if it does not own sufficient assets to survive at the low-income cutoff for three months. Data from the 1999 and 2005 cycles of the Survey of Financial Security suggest asset poverty rates were approximately two to four times higher than the corresponding low-income rates. We show for the first time that, proportionately, households with female lone parents, renters and younger persons were overrepresented among the asset poor. We demonstrate that 14% of Canadians were joint low income and financial asset poor in 2005. The relatively high asset poverty rates suggests a need for anti-poverty policies to better promote financial security.

While the Help for Working Parents (HWP) proposal represents a fundamental and costly change in the nation's safety net for poor families with children, it contains a variety of attributes that should give us pause. Its presumptions regarding the expectations for women's work should be made explicit; it would do well to add provisions that would increase the direct reward for supplying labor and working and provide incentives for employers to offer them work; and it should give more recognition to the fact that many if not most welfare recipients do not have the cognitive skills and experience that will remove them from the end of the queue of low-wage job seekers. However, HWP does make explicit the proposition that the nation's poverty and welfare problems are not likely to be solved “on the cheap.”

We review and critique the empirical literature on the links between investments in children and children's attainments. The primary theoretical perspectives that dominate this literature form the framework for our review. The potential effects on children of family choices and neighborhood characteristics are emphasized. The outcomes of interest include educational attainment, fertility choices, and work-related outcomes such as earnings and welfare recipiency. A set of tables provides details on the existing empirical literature. The focus is on the economics literature, but relevant studies from other social sciences are included as well.

Retirement years are a precarious time for many older Americans. Even if successful in accumulating resources expected to be sufficient to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living, many retirees face unexpected adverse health shocks after retirement. Because of the uncertainty of shocks to physical and cognitive health, there exists the potential for significant deterioration in resource adequacy both at the time of retirement and into the retirement years due to their occurrence. In this study, we select a sample of new retirees constructed from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data and follow them during the first decade of their retirement. Using these data, we identify the nature of shocks to physical and cognitive health for which individuals are at risk during their retirement years, and estimate both the absolute and relative risk of these shocks. We then estimate the impact of the occurrence of these shocks on wealth-based measures of retirement adequacy.

Social scientists have increasingly turned their attention to understanding the linkages between the economic position of parents and that of their children. At its core, these linkages lies behind fundamental questions regarding how our society and its economy works, and how society can alter the parental linkage pattern to secure the outcome that it desires.

Using a propensity score matching approach coupled with difference-in-differences regression analysis, we estimate the effect of receiving a low-income housing voucher on the employment and earnings, mobility, neighborhood quality, household/family composition and childcare utilization of a large longitudinal sample of low-income families in the U.S. We observe these effects over six years following voucher receipt. Our results indicate that voucher receipt has little effect on employment, but a negative effect on earnings. The negative earnings effect is largest in the years immediately following initial receipt, and fades out over time. Full-sample results show voucher receipt to have little effect on neighborhood quality in the short-term, but some positive long-term effects. We also find that voucher receipt is tied to a higher probability of change in household/family composition in the year of voucher receipt, but greater stability in subsequent years. The results of our propensity score matching procedure show voucher receipt to be tied to a greater take-up of public child care subsidies. Several robustness tests are run to support the reliability of our findings. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and policy.