IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/restat/v79y2000i3p406-414.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Estimating Earnings Poverty In 1939: A Comparison Of Orshansky-Method And Price-Indexed Definitions Of Poverty

Author

Listed:
  • Linda Barrington

Abstract

Official poverty lines do not exist for the United States for years prior to 1959. In this paper a poverty line comparable to the seminal line is constructed for 1939 using the Orshansky method. Poverty rates are then calculated using the earnings data of the 1940 Public Use Microdata Sample of the U.S. Census. A comparison with similar work by Ross et al. (1987) demonstrates the degree to which continual price indexing of the poverty line results in inappropriate estimates. A trend of increasing incidence of poverty among female-headed households prior to 1960 is also revealed. © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Suggested Citation

  • Linda Barrington, 2000. "Estimating Earnings Poverty In 1939: A Comparison Of Orshansky-Method And Price-Indexed Definitions Of Poverty," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 79(3), pages 406-414, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:79:y:2000:i:3:p:406-414
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/003465300556995
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:79:y:2000:i:3:p:406-414. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kelly McDougall (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.