Authors:

Gabriella Calabia

Date Created:

Not specified

Course Title:

Professor:

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About Paper:

Poverty is tied to notions of wellbeing and human need. Poverty measures therefore define who is in poverty and quantify how many people are in poverty. These measures compare resources with needs and rest on normative assumptions about what constitutes an adequate level of wellbeing. A central challenge is that "need" can be defined in different ways, as in the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and the more recent Health-Inclusive Poverty Measure (HIPM). The SPM defines need based on basic living costs such as food, clothing, shelter, and utilities, whereas the HIPM extends this definition to include medical needs and the adequacy of insurance coverage. Using the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC), I compare poverty rates under both measures for the United States overall and across demographic subgroups. I then implement counterfactual analyses to assess how major safety net programs reduce poverty under each measure and to compare these effects across measures. I show that alternative definitions of need change both the level and composition of measured poverty and the estimated effects of safety net programs, including those tied to insurance coverage. These differences affect how poverty is measured, how policies are characterized, and how recent changes to programs such as Medicare and Medicaid are evaluated.

Source:

Columbia / Cognitive Science / 2026

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Gabriella Calabia