Date of Award
2008
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Open Access)
Department
Colby College. Economics Dept.
Advisor(s)
Michael R. Donihue
Second Advisor
Philip H. Brown
Abstract
Despite being one of the world’s most prosperous countries, the United States of America was home to roughly 7.7 million households living in poverty in 2006. Of this figure, 53% percent of households were headed by a single mother. What is more disturbing is that a significant majority of these households were those of full time workers, unable to meet the basic needs of their families at federally mandated minimum wage rates. Researchers and activists from a multitude of disciplines have repeatedly called for an overhaul of the current method of estimating poverty in the United States` and further proposed a variety of tools for its revaluation. This paper makes use of some of those tools to motivate an analysis of demographic differences in household expenditure on basic necessities as a way of bringing the plight of these families into the spotlight being cast on issues of poverty. Using recently released data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper looks at the how certain demographic characteristics affect household expenditure and which categories of expenditure put a family at risk of falling (albeit unnoticed) below a more realistic measure of poverty than the one currently in use.
Keywords
poverty, working poor, demographics
Recommended Citation
Tharakan, Joerose, "Demographic Differences in Household Expenditure for Low-Income Families: Evidence from the United States" (2008). Honors Theses. Paper 663.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/663
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