Income Distribution Commons^™

Does Economic Decline Contribute To A Decline In Children’S Food Security?, Kimberly Groover, Bradford Mills, George Davis

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

Most Americans believe that children should not experience persistent worry about the quality or quantity of food consumed due to low household resources. Since 1995, the USDA has tracked children’s food security based upon household responses to the annual Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS). During this time, a small, but recently growing, share of U.S. households report multiple indicators of reduced food intake and disrupted eating patterns among children due to inadequate resources to obtain food (Coleman- Jenson et al, 2012). The USDA classifies children as food secure, low food secure, or very low food secure based upon …

The Economic Impact Of Latin American & Other Immigrants Iowa, Nebraska And The Omaha-Council Bluffs Metropolitan Area, Christopher Decker, Jerry Deichert, Lourdes Gouveia

Latino/Latin American Studies Reports

Although recent research from the Pew Hispanic Center suggests that the rate of recent immigration to the United States has slowed considerably, other studies clearly show that immigrants make substantial economic contributions to the communities in which they settle.

This report focuses attention on the quantitative economic impact of first-generation, foreign-born individuals on the Omaha-Council Bluffs economy as well as the Nebraska and Iowa state economies in 2010.

Multigenerational Families And Food Insecurity, James P. Ziliak, Craig Gundersen

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

The prevalence of multigenerational families is on the rise in the United States, as is food insecurity. We estimate the effect of resident grandchildren on the risk of and transitions in food insecurity using repeated cross sections and longitudinally linked two-year panels of the Current Population Survey from 2001-2010. We find that rates of food insecurity in families with a grandchild present are at least twice as high in a typical year compared to families without a resident grandchild, and the extent of very low food security increased substantially faster among these households over the past decade. The rise in …

Income Inequality In U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Which Areas Have The Greatest Inequality And Why?, C. Peterson Compton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, much focus has been placed on the high and growing level of income inequality in the United States. This composition begins to fill a void in the existing literature by examining specific urban areas that have particularly high levels of inequality and the characteristics that factor into inequality. In this paper, I construct a qualitative model for a particularly unequal metropolitan area. I then apply the model to a set of U.S. metros that are among the most unequal in the country and share a particular set of characteristics consistent with the model.

How Do Latino Groups Fare In A Changing Economy? Occupation In Latino Groups In The Greater New York City Area, 1980-2009, Stephen Ruszczyk

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This study examines demographic and socioeconomic factors of racial/ethnic groups in New York City between 1980 and 2009 – particularly the Latino population.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: Trends from 1990 continued in 2000, with numbers of Puerto Ricans in production dropping to only 14% of that group. More than a fifth of Puerto Ricans worked in management and professional …

Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we propose a new method of poverty decomposition. Our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time-reversion consistency and subperiod additivity. It integrates the existing methods of growth-redistribution decomposition and sector-based decomposition, because it allows us to decompose poverty change into growth and redistribution components for each group (e.g. regions or sectors) in the economy. We extend our method to have six components and provide an empirical application to the Philippines for the period 1985-2009.

Food Insecurity Across The First Five Years: Triggers Of Onset And Exit, Alison Jacknowitz, Taryn W. Morrissey

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

Very low food security among young children is associated with developmental deficiencies. However, little is known about the factors that predict entry into or exit from very low food security during early childhood. This study seeks to: (1) Understand the triggers that explain movements into or out of very low food security among children from birth to age five; (2) Examine the first aim using different definitions of food insecurity. The analysis relies on the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), a longitudinal, nationally representative dataset of approximately 10,700 children, to estimate linear probability models. Results suggest that residential moves …

The Impact Of Incarceration On Food Insecurity Among Households With Children, Sally Wallace, Robynn Cox

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

This study seeks to determine the role that parental incarceration plays on the probability of food insecurity among families with children and very low food security of children using micro-level data from the Fragile Families and Child Well Being Study (FFCWS). The data set contains the 18-question food security module which allows us to explore the link between incarceration and food insecurity and very low food security among children, families, and adults. The incidence of very low food security in our data is somewhat higher than the national average, but the incidence of other levels of food security is similar …

The Effect Of Safety Net Programs On Food Insecurity, Lucie Schmidt, Lara Shore-Sheppard, Tara Watson

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

Does the safety net reduce food insecurity in families? In this paper we investigate how the structure of benefits for five major safety net programs – TANF, SSI, EITC, SNAP, and Medicaid – affects low food security in families and very low food security among children. We build a calculator for the years 2001-2009 to impute eligibility and benefits for these programs in each state, taking into account cross-program eligibility rules. To identify a causal effect of the safety net, we instrument for imputed eligibility and benefits using simulated eligibility and benefits for a nationally representative sample. Focusing on non-immigrant, …

Estimating The Economic Impact Of Garvan Woodland Gardens, Katherin A. Deck, Viktoria Riiman

Publications and Presentations

The study is organized as follows. First, the facilities and programs at Garvan Woodland Gardens are described in detail. Next, information on visitor and member counts, employment and volunteers, and financial information from the Gardens are provided. Finally, the results of the economic impact analysis from the IMPLAN input‐output model are presented for employment, value‐added, and output impacts on the Hot Springs area and the state of Arkansas. The detailed employment and output impacts by industry are available in the Appendix. Estimated employment impacts are compared to the county and state employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to …

Identifying The Effect Of Wic On Very Low Food Security Among Infants And Children, Brent Kreider, John V. Pepper, Manan Roy

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

The Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC) is considered a crucial component of the social safety net in the United States, yet there is limited supporting evidence on the effects of WIC on the nutritional well-being and food security of infants and young children. Two key identification problems have been especially difficult to address. First, the decision to take up WIC is endogenous as households are not randomly assigned to the program; recipients are likely to differ from nonrecipients in unobserved ways (e.g., prior health) that are related to associated outcomes. Second, survey respondents often fail to report receiving public …

Family Structure, Work Patterns And Time Allocations: Potential Mechanisms Of Food Insecurity Among Children, Kelly Balistreri

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

Over 469 thousand households in the U.S. experienced very low food security among children, a severe condition characterized by reductions in food intake due to an inability to afford enough food. But food insecurity is not simply about economic resources. There exists a paradox in which some poor households with children are food secure while some non-poor households with children are food insecure. This study moves beyond a singular focus on income and considers how the family context may protect or generate risk of food insecurity for children. The goals of the proposed project were to: 1) to provide a …

Two Can Live As Cheaply As One...But Three’S A Crowd, Christopher Bollinger, Cheti Nicoletti, Stephen Pudney

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

To measure poverty, incomes must be equivalized across households with different structures. In this paper, we use a very flexible ordered response model to analyze the relationship between income, demographic structure and subjective assessments of financial wellbeing drawn from the 1991-2008 British Household Panel Survey. Our results suggest the existence of large scale economies within marital/cohabiting couples, but substantial diseconomies from the addition of children or further adults. This pattern contrasts sharply with commonly-used equivalence scales, and is consistent with explanations in terms of the capital requirements associated with additions to the core couple.

Unequal Progress: The Annual Report On The Economic Status Of The Profession 2002-03, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Most colleges and universities adopted budgets for the 2002-03 academic year in the spring and early summer of 2002. At that time, a pessimist might have cited several factors – negative rates of return from institutional endowments, a rising unemployment rate, an economic recession, and large increases in college and university enrollments, for example - to predict that faculty members would not see their earnings increase substantially in real terms in the coming year. The good news is that, overall and on average, the pessimists' worst fears proved incorrect. The bad news is that the overall aver-ages don't tell …

Was There A ‘Race To The Bottom’ After Welfare Reform?, Sarah K. Burns

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

Leading up to the passage of the 1996 welfare reform, there was much speculation and debate over the possibility that states would "race to the bottom" in setting welfare generosity if given more control over their individual programs. In the fifteen years after welfare reform, did such a race to the bottom ensue? Using a spatial dynamic econometric approach I investigate welfare competition across multiple policy instruments and across three distinct welfare periods - the AFDC regime, the experimental waiver period leading up to the reform, and the TANF era. Results suggest strategic policy setting occurs over multiple dimensions of …

Is Earnings Nonresponse Ignorable?, Christopher R. Bollinger, Barry T. Hirsch

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

Earnings nonresponse in the Current Population Survey is roughly 30% in the monthly surveys and 20% in the March survey. If nonresponse is ignorable, unbiased estimates can be achieved by omitting nonrespondents. Little is known about whether CPS nonresponse is ignorable. Using sample frame measures to identify selection, we find clear-cut evidence among men but limited evidence among women for negative selection into response. Wage equation slope coefficients are affected little by selection but because of intercept shifts, wages for men and to a lesser extent women are understated, as are gender gaps. Selection is least severe among household heads.

Empirical Consequences Of Comparable Worth, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] To help focus subsequent debate, this paper presents a nontechnical survey of the small but growing empirical literature by economists on the consequences of comparable worth. I discuss in turn studies of the consequences of comparable worth on the male-female earnings gap, of its potential to affect adversely the employment of women, of its effects on the labor supply and occupational mobility of women, and of its effects on women and their families as a group. The survey is critical in nature and points to areas in which research is needed.

The Child And Adult Care Food Program And Food Insecurity, Colleen Heflin, Irma Arteaga, Sara Gable

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

High rates of food insecurity are a significant problem in the United States. It is currently estimated that more than 48.8 million people live in food insecure households, meaning that at some time during the previous year, they were unable to acquire or were uncertain of having enough food to meet basic needs due to inadequate household resources (Coleman-Jensen, Nord, Andrews, & Carlson, 2011). Rates of food insecurity are substantially higher among those in households with incomes below the poverty line (40.2%) and in households with children headed by a single woman (35.1%). Levels of food insecurity increased across U.S. …

Childhood Income Volatility And Adult Outcomes, Bradley Hardy

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

Using data linked across generations in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I estimate the relationship between exposure to volatile income during childhood and a set of socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood. The empirical framework is an augmented intergenerational income mobility model that includes controls for income volatility. I measure income volatility at the family level in two ways. First, instability as measured by squared deviations around a family-specific mean, and then as percent changes of 25 percent or more. Volatility enters the model both separately and interacted with income level. I find that family income instability during childhood has a …

Decomposing Trends In Income Volatility: The ‘Wild Ride’ At The Top And Bottom, Bradley Hardy, James P. Ziliak

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

We provide a detailed accounting of the trend increase in family income volatility in recent decades by quantifying the contributions of household head earnings, spouse earnings, non-transfer non-labor income, transfer income, and tax payments (inclusive of the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit), along with covariances among the income components. Using twoyear matched panels in the Current Population Survey from 1980 to 2009, we find that the volatility of family income, as measured by the variance of the arc percent change, doubled over the past three decades. The increase in volatility was most pronounced among the top 1% of the income …