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...

Economists have strong theoretical predictions about how in-kind transfer programs – such as providing vouchers for food – impact consumption. Despite the prominence of the theory, there has been little empirical work documenting actual responses to in-kind transfers. In this work, we...

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,...