This paper analyzes patterns of black and white mobility to determine the causes for the increase in the geographic concentration of black poverty during the 1970s. Using a special tabulation of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics that appended census tract information to individual records, we...

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...

Using data from the NLSY97, we construct two measures of poverty using the official definition and The National Research Council (NRC) definition. We estimate the two poverty rates for 1996 for youths 12-16 as 17.9 (official) and 23.4 (NRC), and document the discrepancies between youths...

The relationship between parenting style and adolescent functioning was examined in a sample of 302 African American adolescent girls and their mothers who live in impoverished neighborhoods. Although previous research has found that authoritative parenting, as compared to authoritarian,...

Benefit receipt in major household surveys is often underreported. This understatement has major implications for our understanding of the economic circumstances of disadvantaged populations and the distributional effects of government programs. This paper examines underreporting of food stamps...

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...

Despite concerns about inequalities in the provision of health care in the US and despite a considerable amount of previous research, we know little about the distribution of medical services across income or more broadly defined socioeconomic groups. This paper uses a unique data file from the...

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,...