Poverty and the Incidence of Material Hardship, Revisited

We examine trends in seven types of material hardship, such as food and housing hardships, and how their incidence by poverty status changed over the 1992 to 2011 period.

We use data from multiple panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation and logistic regressions to examine these relationships.

We find declines in four of the seven hardships, with little change or moderate increases for the others. Declines were larger for hardships more dependent on longer-term income flows, while those more sensitive to short-term income fluctuations declined by less (or increased). Notably, declines in hardship were most evident among the lowest-income groups over the period.

That short-term hardships did not decline suggests that income volatility poses an important challenge for many households. Larger declines in hardship among the lowest income groups suggest a greater under-reporting of income over time and the presence of family resources not comprehensively counted in the official poverty measure.