Children’s Risks of Ever Experiencing Household Poverty: Evaluating Poverty Indicators and Estimating Single and Joint Risk

Peter Fallesen, Rockwool Foundation
Lawrence M. Berger, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Simone Johansen , Rockwool Foundation
Marie Louise Schultz-Nielsen, Rockwool Foundation

Material scarcity and parental social disconnection increase children’s risk for unsuccessful transition to adulthood. Yet, we know little about children’s cumulative risk of experiencing poverty-related life circumstances during childhood. Using synthetic cohort lifetables and administrative data, we estimate the individual and joint cumulative risks for experiencing living in a household with income below the OECD poverty line and living in a low-work intensity household for Danish children. The poverty and social exclusion indicators capture to a large extent the same group of children in the population, but important temporal orderings of when children experience the different indicators are present. Further, using multiple indicators when estimating the cumulative risk of experiencing poverty and social exclusion also dampen the business cycle variation in the relative poverty line based indicator. Linking multiple indicators makes it easier to distinguish long term trends in the cumulative risk of childhood poverty from short term fluctuations.

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 Presented in Session 227. International Evidence on Poverty and Social Policy