This Paper examines poverty in the United States from 1960 through 2005. We investigate how poverty rates and poverty gaps have changed over time, explore how these trends differ across family types, contrast these trends for several different income and consumption measures of poverty, and...

Benefit receipt in major household surveys is often under-reported. In recent years, as many as half of the dollars received through Food Stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Workers’ Compensation has not been reported in the Current Population Survey (CPS). High rates of...

Benefit receipt in major household surveys is often underreported. This understatement has major implications for our understanding of the economic circumstances of disadvantaged populations, program takeup, the distributional effects of government programs, and studies of other program effects....

This paper examines income and consumption based measures of poverty for those 65 and over between 1972 and 2004. This study contributes to the existing literature on poverty in several ways. First, we construct consumption based measures of poverty that improve upon measures used in previous...

This paper examines the measurement of poverty in the United States from 1972 through 2004. We investigate how poverty rates and poverty gaps have changed over time, explore how these trends differ across demographic groups, and contrast these trends for several different income and consumption...

In the U.S., analyses of poverty rates and the effects of anti-poverty programs rely almost exclusively on income data. In earlier work (Meyer and Sullivan, 2003) we emphasized that conceptual arguments generally favor using consumption data to measure the wellbeing of the poor, and, on balance,...

We determine the prevalence of disability and examine how a wide range of outcomes change with disability. The outcomes we examine include employment, hours, earnings, income and consumption. We have five main findings. First, disability rates are high. We find that nearly one-fifth of male...

This paper examines unemployment duration and the incidence of claims following a 36 percent increase in the maximum weekly benefit in New York State. This benefit increase sharply increased benefits for a large group of claimants, while leaving them unchanged for a large share of claimants who...

In this paper, I first summarize how the U.S. Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) operates and describe the characteristics of recipients. I then discuss empirical work on the effects of the EITC on poverty and income distribution, and its effects on labor supply. Next, I discuss a few policy...

In this paper, I first summarize how the U.S. Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) operates and describe the characteristics of recipients. I then discuss empirical work on the effects on hours of work and marriage, and problems of compliance with the tax system. I then simulate the effects of the...