Multigenerational Poverty and Program Participation

• In Event: Place and Opportunity: Human Services and Public Policy

Abstract

Since President Johnson’s War on Poverty, an expanded social safety net has contributed to substantial declines in poverty in the United States. Despite this progress, to what extent are families persistently poor across generations? Recent work shows that the parent-child dyad is insufficient for fully capturing the process of generational persistence. Information on grandparents reveals that two-generation associations often understate the true rate of generational persistence. Poverty traps and racial segregation may make this omission particularly relevant towards the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution. In this study, we use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to describe generational changes in poverty and program participation. We document descriptive transitions of program participation and poverty status across three generations. Next, we show conditioning tests that suggest that grandparent effects are robust to the inclusion of explanatory parental covariates for education, wage rate, and employment status. We also test the role of grandparent proximity and discuss its limitations for identifying direct pathways. Finally, we estimate nonlinearities in multigenerational persistence by outcome intensity showing, for instance, that grandparent effects are consistent below 200 percent of the federal poverty level and disappear at higher incomes. In total, our results imply that persistent economic disadvantage is understated without considering fuller measures of family legacy. In our discussion, we relate these results back to the social mobility literature and issues around interpretation as well as sensitivity analyses.

Authors

• Robert Paul Hartley, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Christopher L. Pulliam, Columbia University
  Presenting Author