CPR Working Paper Series No. 82
County Characteristics
and Poverty Spell Length
Andrew Grodner, John A. Bishop and Thomas Kniesner
Spring 2007 [Revised from May 2006]
Abstract:
In this paper we ask, how do individual and community
factors influence the average length of poverty spells? We measure local
economic conditions by the county unemployment rate and neighborhood
spillover effects by the racial makeup and poverty rate of the county. We
find that moving an individual from one standard deviation below the mean
poverty rate to one standard deviation above the mean poverty rate (from the
inner city to the suburbs) lowers the average poverty spell by 20 to 25
percent. This effect is equal in magnitude to the effect of changing the
household head from female to male. Also, we find that when we control for
the demographic, human capital, and county level effects the conditional
effect for high school graduates is only 2 months (85 percent smaller than
the unconditional effect), black poverty spells are 7.8 months (half of the
unconditional effect), and female headed households increase length of
spells by 7.7 months (only 20 percent shorter than the unconditional
effect).
A revised version of Working Paper No. 82 can be found at: Applied Economics Quarterly, Vo. 53, No. 1, 2007, pp. 19-44.
