Urban poverty: Theory and evidence from American cities

Francesco Andreoli (), Mauro Mussini and Vincenzo Prete

No 2019-07, LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

Abstract: The concentrated poverty index, i.e. the proportion of a metro area's poor population living in extreme-poverty neighborhoods, is widely adopted as a policy-relevant measure of urban poverty. We challenge this view and develop a family of new indices of urban poverty that, differently from concentrated poverty measures, i) capture aspects of the incidence and distribution of poverty across neighborhoods and ii) are grounded on empirical evidence that living in a high-poverty neighborhood is detrimental for many dimensions of residents's well-being. We demonstrate that a parsimonious axiomatic model that incorporates these two aspects characterizes exactly one urban poverty index. We show that changes of this urban poverty index within the same city are additively decomposable into the contribution of demographic, convergence, re-ranking and spatial effects. We collect new evidence of heterogeneous patterns and trends of urban poverty across American metro areas over the last 35 years and use city characteristics to identify relevant drivers.

Keywords: concentrated poverty; axiomatic; decomposition; Census; ACS; spatial (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 I32 P25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.liser.lu/publi_viewer.cfm?tmp=4321 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Working Paper: Urban poverty: Theory and evidence from American cities (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:irs:cepswp:2019-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) 11, Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, G.-D. Luxembourg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Library and Documentation ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).