TY - JOUR AU - Deaton, Angus AU - Paxson, Christina TI - Measuring Poverty Among the Elderly JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 5296 PY - 1995 Y2 - October 1995 DO - 10.3386/w5296 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5296 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5296.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Angus Deaton School of Public and International Affairs 127 Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544-1013 Tel: 609/258-5967 Fax: 609/258-5974 E-Mail: deaton@princeton.edu Christina Paxson Office of the President Brown University Box 1860 Providence, RI 02912 Tel: 401/863-1979 E-Mail: christina_paxson@brown.edu M1 - published as Angus S. Deaton, Christina Paxson. "Measuring Poverty among the Elderly," in David A. Wise, editor, "Inquiries in the Economics of Aging" University of Chicago Press (1998) AB - Poverty counts are counts of individuals in poverty but are calculated from household or family data on income or expenditure. The transition from one to the other requires assumptions about intrahousehold allocation, about differences in needs across different people, and about the extent of economies of scale. The number of elderly in poverty, or the number of children in poverty, is sensitive to these assumptions and to differences in living arrangements across age groups. We explore the sensitivity of poverty counts to variations in assumptions about child costs and economies of scale using data from the United States and from six large Indian states. Because living arrangements of the elderly are so different in the United States and India, the use of the latter forces us to think about household structure and poverty in the United States. We argue that the official poverty counts in the United States are compromised by unrealistically high costs of children and by unrealistically high economies of scale. We provide a discussion of how economies of scale and child costs can be estimated from the data, using identifying assumptions that label private goods and adult goods, and we make calculations based on the 1990 Consumer Expenditure Survey. We obtain plausible estimates of child costs, together with a number of interesting but hard-to-explain anomalies when we try to estimate economies of scale. ER -