Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Deep And Chronic Poverty In The P.S.I.D. - Assessing The Panel Survey Of Income Dynamics Using Pα And Kα Indices, Paul G. Metzler

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Poverty, while an intuitive concept, proves harder to specify and measure, especially over time. Foster, Greer and Thorebecke (1984) introduced an axiomatically sound, and commonly used poverty index Pα that is later developed by Foster (2009) to include time spent in poverty. I use their dual-cutoff spells approach to determine the occurrence, depth, and severity of poverty in a longitudinal dataset.

Using the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics over the timeframe 1990-2010, high-risk populations are explored further, especially African Americans, unmarried females, and those without a high school diploma. I explore the proportions of poverty incidence to find head of …