TY  - JOUR
AU  - Blank,Rebecca M.
AU  - Blinder,Alan S.
TI  - Macroeconomics, Income Distribution, and Poverty
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 1567
PY  - 1985
Y2  - February 1985
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w1567
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w1567.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Rebecca M. Blank
Under Secretary for Economic Affairs
Department of Commerce
Economics and Statistics Administration
Herbert C. Hoover Building, Room 4848
1401 Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington, DC  20230
Tel: 202-482-3727
Fax: 202-482-0432
E-Mail: rblank@doc.gov

Alan S. Blinder
Department of Economics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-1021
Tel: 609/258-3358
Fax: 609/258-5398
E-Mail: blinder@princeton.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1985-06-01
AB  - This paper investigates the impacts of macroeconomic activity and policy on the poverty population. It is shown that both the poverty count and the income share of the lowest quintile of income recipients move significantly with the business cycle. The differential impact of inflation versus unemployment on low income groups is analyzed at length.The evidence indicates that unemployment has very large and negative effects on the poor, while inflation appears to have few effects at all. In addition, changes in tax policy since 1950 have led to decreasing progressivity in the overall tax structure. Special attention is given to changes in the poverty rate over the past decade and to prospective changes in the remainder of the 1980s.
ER  -