Family Poverty in Black and White: Results From a New Poverty Measure

Advances in poverty measurement have opened new opportunities for investigating differences in poverty among racial and ethnic groups. Some researchers have attributed differences in poverty to differences in group characteristics, such as marital status or educational attainment, whereas others have focused on labor market differences or to differential benefits from taxes and transfer payments. This paper brings together all of these approaches to investigate the history of Black–White poverty differentials for families with children from 1980 to 2014. We break the history of the Black–White poverty differential into three “eras”: 1980 to 1992, when the racial differential was largely driven by the business cycle; 1992 to 2002, when the racial differential was reduced substantially; and 2002 to 2014, when the differential could have been strongly influenced by the Great Recession, but was not. For each era, we examine the extent to which the changes in the poverty differential were influenced by changes in tax and transfer payment policy and by changes in family demographic and labor market characteristics. We find that labor market changes and changes in tax credits and transfer payments have strongly influenced the differential, though racial differences in marital structure, family work effort, and heads’ educational attainment also continue to play a role.

Local Labor Market Inequality in the Age of Mass Incarceration

We contend that the rise of mass incarceration in the United States can be framed through the lens of stratification economics, which views race- and class-based discrimination as a rational attempt on behalf of privileged groups to preserve their relative status and the material benefits which that status confers. Using the first (to our knowledge) local-level data set on incarceration rates by race, we explore the relationship between income inequality, poverty, and incarceration at the commuting zone level from 1950 to the present. Consistent with Michelle Alexander’s hypothesis that expansion of the penal system and the rise of “tough on crime” policy were efforts by privileged groups to drive a wedge into working-class political coalitions formed out of the Civil Rights Movement, we find that labor markets with greater inequality experienced larger increases in the overall incarceration rate. Furthermore, we find that relative rates of poverty play a key role in explaining differential effects of mass incarceration across race. Areas where White poverty rates were large relative to non-White poverty rates experienced no significant change in White incarceration, but an expansion of non-White incarceration. These findings have implications for policies related to economic and judicial systems.

Born Poor? Racial Diversity, Inequality, and the American Pipeline

The authors examine racial disparities in infants’ exposure to economic disadvantage at the family and local area levels. Using data from the 2008–2014 files of the American Community Survey, the authors provide an up-to-date empirical benchmark of newborns’ exposure to poverty. Large shares of Hispanic (36.5 percent) and black (43.2 percent) infants are born poor, though white infants are also overrepresented among the poor (17.7 percent). The authors then estimate regression models to identify risk factors and perform decompositions to identify compositional factors underlying between-race differences. Although more than half of the black-white poverty gap is explained by differences in family structure and employment, these factors account for less than one quarter of white-Hispanic differences. The results also highlight the unmet need for social protection among babies born to poor families lacking access to assistance programs and the safety net. Hispanic infants are particularly likely to be doubly disadvantaged in this manner. Moreover, large and disproportionate shares of today’s black (48.3 percent) and Hispanic (40.5 percent) babies are born into poor families and places with poverty rates above 20 percent. These results raise important questions about persistent and possibly growing racial inequality as America makes its way to a majority-minority society as early as 2043.