We examine the impact of government transfers and the business cycle on poverty in the United States in the context of a poverty function that includes the official poverty rate, three types of government transfers, real wages, the number of female-headed families, and a business cycle variable....

Normalising CES production functions in the calibration of basic dynamic models allows to choose technology parameters in an economically plausible way. When variations in the elasticity of substitution are considered, normalisation is necessary in order to exclude arbitrary effects. As an...