creator: Danziger, Sheldon
subjectcollectiondatepublishercreatorformat description- – This paper asks two questions about child poverty dynamics. The first is whether long-run transitions out of poverty have changed. The second is whether the events associated with exits from poverty have changed. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to contrast the patterns of children 0 to 5 over the 1970's to patterns for similar children over the 1980's. We find that roughly half of the children who were in poor families at the start of each decade remained poor. For black children and children in female headed households, both the relative and absolute mobility are considerably lower. These mobility rates show no significant changes over time. Likewise, the events associated with exits out of poverty are remarkably stable.
subjectcollectiondatepublishercreatorformat description- – This paper tracks distributional changes over the last quarter of the twentieth century. We focus on three conceptually distinct distributions: the distribution of wages, the distribution of annual earnings and the distribution of total family income adjusted for family size. We show that all three distributions became less equal during the last half of the 1970's and the 1980's. This was, however, not the case during the 1990's. Wage inequality stabilized, earnings inequality declined and family income inequality actually continued to rise. We decompose changes in family income inequality over the last quarter century and show that roughly half of the increase is accounted for by changes in the distribution of earnings. This suggests that further research on family income inequality should pay as much attention to changes in the distribution of other income sources as to factors affecting the labor market.
subjectcollectiondatepublishercreatorformat
