Non-disabled, working age adults without children are required to work 20 hours per week in order to maintain eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. However, states may waive the work requirement for areas that meet conditions reflective of a weak labor market. We...

Using Census Bureau estimates of the market value of in-kind transfers and Current Population Survey (ASEC-CPS) data over the period 1979 to 2007, Burkhauser et al. (2012b) construct measures of income and its distribution. We extend their work forward to 2016 and back to 1967 using ASEC-CPS...

We evaluate progress in President's Johnson's War on Poverty. We do so relative to the scientifically arbitrary but policy relevant 20 percent baseline poverty rate he established for 1963. No existing poverty measure fully captures poverty reductions based on the standard that President Johnson...

The share of women in the top 1% of the UK's income distribution has been growing over the last two decades (as in several other countries). Our first contribution is to account for this secular change using regressions of the probability of being in the top 1%, fitted separately for men and...

Advocates of minimum wage increases have long touted their potential to reduce poverty. This study assesses this claim. Using data spanning nearly four decades from the March Current Population Survey, and a dynamic difference-in-differences approach, we find that a 10 percent increase in the...

Access to IRS personal income tax records improves researchers' ability to track U.S. income and inequality, especially at the very top of the distribution (Piketty and Saez 2003). However, rather than following standard Haig-Simons income definitions, tax form income measures were designed to...

Estimates of UK income inequality trends differ substantially according to whether estimates are based on household survey data (used for official statistics) or tax return data (used in the top incomes literature). We reconcile differences in variable definitions and combine survey and tax...

The factors leading individuals to immigrate to developed nations are widely studied, but comparatively less is known about those who emigrate from them. In this paper, we use data from a nationally representative cohort of Australian adults to develop longitudinal measures of emigration and to...

Since 2012 the Congressional Budget Office has included an estimate of the market value of government-provided health insurance coverage in its measures of household income. We follow this practice for both public and private health insurance to capture the impact of greater access to...

Inconsistent censoring in the public-use March CPS limits its usefulness in measuring labor earnings trends, as previous approaches for imputing topcoded earnings systematically understate top earnings. Using Pareto estimation methods with less-censored internal data, we create an enhanced...