Panel:
Methods for Addressing Benefit Underreporting and Their Implications for Poverty Measurement & Evaluation
(Poverty and Income Policy)
Saturday, November 10, 2018: 3:15 PM-4:45 PM
Jefferson - Mezz Level (Marriott Wardman Park)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Panel Chairs: Liana Fox, U.S. Census Bureau
Discussants: Suzanne Macartney, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
This panel includes four papers that address the underreporting of means-tested transfers in the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS ASEC) for the purpose of poverty measurement and evaluation. Prior research has demonstrated that the CPS ASEC fails to capture roughly half of TANF and SNAP benefits administered in a given year (Meyer & Mittag, 2015). As such, estimates of poverty that do not take underreporting into account are likely to overestimate the true prevalence of income poverty. The Urban Institute’s TRIM3 microsimulation program utilizes state-year policy rules and administrative records to impute a large share of the missing benefits back into the CPS ASEC. The papers in this panel provide an overview of TRIM’s benefit imputation procedures and the usefulness of the imputations for evaluating the anti-poverty effects of SNAP and TANF, trends in ‘deep’ and ‘extreme’ poverty from 1993 onward, and the effect of simulated TANF and SNAP participation rates on child poverty outcomes. The session will inform future research on income poverty and potential methods for addressing underreporting in the CPS ASEC dataset.
