Friday, November 7, 2014
:
10:15 AM
Isleta (Convention Center)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
The federal Interagency Technical Working Group that established the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) emphasized that the SPM “should be considered a work in progress, with the expectation that there will be improvements to it over time.” One area where progress might be made could be the equivalence scale used to adjust the SPM thresholds for family size and age composition. The National Academy of Sciences panel on whose work the scale was based noted that none of the published methods used for developing such scales in the past are “fully defensible.” The current SPM scale assumes that adding children adds much less to a family’s needs than does adding adults – generally incrementing as much for two additional children as for one additional adult, a much larger distinction than is implicit in the traditional Orshansky poverty thresholds used in the official poverty definition.
This paper develops a new approach for assessing equivalence scales, drawing on multiple measures of material hardship in the Survey of Income and Program Participation’s Adult Well-Being Module. Using signs of recent financial distress such as unpaid rent and mortgage, unpaid utility bills, shut off phone service, and difficulties affording food as indicators of of "true" poverty, I explore the fit between experiencing multiple hardship and various definitions of poverty. I find preliminary evidence favoring increasing the per-child increment in the equivalence scale used for the SPM.
This paper develops a new approach for assessing equivalence scales, drawing on multiple measures of material hardship in the Survey of Income and Program Participation’s Adult Well-Being Module. Using signs of recent financial distress such as unpaid rent and mortgage, unpaid utility bills, shut off phone service, and difficulties affording food as indicators of of "true" poverty, I explore the fit between experiencing multiple hardship and various definitions of poverty. I find preliminary evidence favoring increasing the per-child increment in the equivalence scale used for the SPM.
