Macroeconomic Fluctuations and Poverty

This article examines the dynamic relationship between macroeconomic performance and measures of poverty in the United States. The article is organized as follows. Section 2 presents insights on the relationship between poverty and macroeconomic performance that emerge from the literature. The emphasis is on empirical studies from 1986 to 2011. Section 3 provides a snapshot of the change in poverty over National Bureau of Economic Research-dated recessions for a variety of poverty measures. Section 4 uses vector autoregressions (VARs) to characterize the response of poverty to innovations in various social indicators and measures of macroeconomic performance. Section 5 expands the empirical analysis to include alternative measures of poverty—a consumption-based poverty rate constructed by Meyer and Sullivan (2010) and an income-based poverty rate constructed by Broda and colleagues (2009) by using a consumer price index that has been adjusted for substitution and quality bias. Section 6 conducts a forecasting exercise for income poverty and consumption poverty. Section 7 concludes and offers suggestions for future research.