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...

We examine the relationship between the business cycle and poverty for the period from 1960 to 2008 using income data from the Current Population Survey and consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This new evidence on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and poverty...

This paper examines the quality of data collected in the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey, which is the source for the Consumer Price Index weights and is the main source of U.S. consumption microdata. We compare reported spending on a large number of categories of goods and services to...

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 well-being of the poor, and, on...

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...

This paper investigates how material well-being has changed over time for those at the bottom of the distributions of income and consumption. We document the sharp differences between recent trends in measured income and consumption, focusing on families headed by a single mother. Since the...

High rates of understatement are found for many government transfer programs and in many datasets. This understatement has major implications for our understanding of economic well-being and the effects of transfer programs. We provide estimates of the extent of under-reporting for ten transfer...

The tax and welfare programs that provide income and in-kind benefits to single mothers have changed dramatically in recent years. These changes began as far back as the mid-1980s and culminated with the 1996 welfare law that 'ended welfare as we knew it.' These tax and welfare changes have...

We examine changes in consumption and income inequality between 2000 and 2011. During the most recent recession, unemployment rose and asset values declined sharply. We investigate how the recession affected inequality while addressing concerns about underreporting in consumption data. Income...