Projects per year
Abstract
Urban poverty arises from the uneven distribution of poor populations across neighborhoods of a city. We study the trend and drivers of urban poverty across American cities over the last 40 years. To do so, we resort to a family of urban poverty indices that account for features of incidence, distribution, and segregation of poverty across census tracts. Compared to the universally-adopted concentrated poverty index, these measures have a solid normative background. We use tract-level data to assess the extent to which demographics, housing, education, employment, and income distribution affect levels and changes in urban poverty. A decomposition study allows to single out the effect of changes in the distribution of these variables across cities from changes in their correlation with urban poverty. We find that demographics and income distribution have a substantial role in explaining urban poverty patterns, whereas the same effects remarkably differ when using the concentrated poverty indices.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1663-1705 |
Number of pages | 43 |
Journal | Empirical Economics |
Volume | 63 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Feb 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and to conference participants at RES 2018 meeting (Sussex), LAGV 2018 (Aix en Provence) and ECINEQ 2019 (Paris) for commenting on an earlier draft of the paper. The usual disclaimer applies. Replication code for this article is accessible from the authors’ web-pages. This work was supported by the Luxembourg Fonds National de la Recherche (IMCHILD grant INTER/NORFACE/16/11333934/IMCHILD and PREFER-ME CORE grant C17/SC/11715898) and by the University of Verona (Ricerca di Base grants MOBILIFE-2017-RBVR17KFHX and PREOPP-2019-RBVR19FSFA).
Keywords
- American Community Survey
- Census
- Concentrated poverty
- Gini index
- Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition
- Spatial inequality
Projects
- 1 Finished
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IMCHILD: The impact of childhood circumstances on individual outcomes over the life-course
Van Kerm, P., Peichl, A., Waldenström, D., Lefranc, A., Trannoy, A., Iryna, K., Adermon, A., Kanbur, R., Roemer, J., Andreoli, F., Doorley, K. & Hartung, A.
Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)
1/01/18 → 31/12/20
Project: Research