Dear colleagues,
We hereby invite you to join our next Economics
of Inequality Research Seminar at WU Vienna.
Zach Parolin (University of Oxford)
will present the paper
The Intergenerational Persistence of Poverty in the United States.
Date and Time:
Monday, April 13; 3.00 p.m.
Location: WU Vienna,
D4.0.136.
Abstract
Children who grow up in poverty in the United States face a significantly higher risk of adult poverty compared to their peers in other wealthy nations. This study uses 50 years of data from the
Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate whether the expansion of the American welfare state has successfully weakened this intergenerational link. I begin by distinguishing the statistical properties of the intergenerational persistence of poverty (IGPov)
from conventional mobility metrics, such as rank-rank slopes and intergenerational elasticities, showing that IGPov combines material concerns (prevailing poverty rates) with fairness considerations (the relative persistence of poverty). Despite substantial
policy changes and declining child poverty rates in recent decades, I document that high rates of poverty persistence in the U.S. have remained stagnant over the past half-century. Beneath that stability, however, lie diverging mobility patterns by gender
and race/ethnicity. Finally, I show that the mechanisms behind intergenerational poverty differ from standard mobility measures, with employment being far more important than education in linking childhood poverty to adulthood poverty. Aside from reducing
poverty rates through direct taxes and transfers, reducing differences in adulthood employment rates for those from high-poverty backgrounds relative to adults from low-poverty backgrounds is the most direct route toward reducing the intergenerational persistence
of poverty.
Please register your participation
here.
Best regards,
Franziska Disslbacher
----
Franziska Disslbacher, PhD
Assistant Professor
Institute for Spatial & Social-Ecological Transformations
&
Research Institute Economics of Inequality
WU, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria
LSE International Inequalities Institute – Research Fellow |
Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality CUNY |
SOEP / DIW – Associated Researcher
World Inequality Lab PSE– Research Fellow
+43 1 313 36 6669
franziska.disslbacher@wu.ac.at