We discuss poverty measurement, focusing on two alternatives to the current official measure: consumption poverty, and … the Census Bureau's new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that was released for the first time last year. The SPM has … advantages over the official poverty measure, including a more defensible adjustment for family size and composition, an expanded …

In the U.S., analyses of poverty rates and the effects of anti-poverty programs rely almost exclusively on income data … consumption. Measures of overall and sub-group poverty also sharply differ. In addition to examining broader populations and a …

This paper examines poverty in the United States from 1960 through 2005. We investigate how poverty rates and poverty … different income and consumption measures of poverty, and consider explanations for the differences in trends. We document sharp … differences, particularly in recent years, between different income poverty measures, and between income and consumption poverty …

This paper considers the long-run patterns of poverty in the United States from the early 1960s to 2010. Our results … contradict previous studies that have argued that poverty has shown little improvement over time or that anti-poverty efforts … have been ineffective. We find that moving from traditional income-based measures of poverty to a consumption-based measure …