In his Presidential Address to the European Economic Association, Tony Atkinson introduced the idea of a “Charitable Conservatism” position in public policy, which “exhibits a degree of concern for the poor, but this is the limit of the redistributional concern and there is indifference with respect to transfers above the poverty line.” This contrasts with the perspective of poverty indices, wh...

The purpose of this report is to evaluate the proposed Census method for adjusting poverty thresholds for geographic price differences, offer empirically implementable alternatives to the Census approach (including the possibility of making no adjustment at all), and suggest future directions for research on geographic adjustment of poverty thresholds. I am in a particularly good position to do...

Temkin (1986,1993) sets out a philosophical basis for the analysis of income inequality that provides an important alternative to the mainstream welfarist approach. We show that the Temkin principles can be characterised by a parsimonious axiomatic structure and we use this structure to derive a new class of inequality indices and an inequality ordering. This class of indices has a family relat...

This paper considers the long-run patterns of poverty in the United States from the early 1960s to 2010. Our results contradict previous studies that have argued that poverty has shown little improvement over time or that anti-poverty efforts have been ineffective. We find that moving from traditional income-based measures of poverty to a consumption-based measure (which we argue is superior on...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether poverty and unemployment increase the likelihood of or delay recovery from common mental disorders, and whether these associations could be explained by subjective financial strain. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING England, Wales, and Scotland. SUBJECTS 7726 adults aged 16-75 living in private households. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Common mental disorde...

OBJECTIVE To compare the performance of two new approaches to risk adjustment that are free of the influence of observational intensity with methods that depend on diagnoses listed in administrative databases. SETTING Administrative data from the US Medicare program for services provided in 2007 among 306 US hospital referral regions. DESIGN Cross sectional analysis. PARTICIPANTS 20% samp...

This paper examines the determinants of sexual behaviour with special reference to the effect of household socio-economic status as a proxy for poverty. The data are derived from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey; the analysis is restricted to 1,831 never married females age 1524. Both descriptive and analytical methods are used to assess the effects of each poverty-related factor when ...