Winners and Losers in the Economic Downturn: Child Poverty from 1990 to 2009

Carla Shoff, Pennsylvania State University
Diane K. McLaughlin, Pennsylvania State University
Vivian Chen, Tamkang University

To understand the forces affecting child poverty, it is critical to examine the factors associated with changes in county-level percentages of children in poverty in the United States. Because of the large variation in the percent of change, we are interested in identifying how these factors vary across the distribution of the change in child poverty (e.g., is demographic change more influential in counties with larger increases or decreases in child poverty). In order to explore how the factors associated with change in child poverty vary spatially, but also simultaneously vary across the distribution of change in child poverty, we employ a geographically weighted quantile regression approach using data from the 1990 and 2000 census and the 2005/2009 American Community Survey to examine whether the factors associated with change in child poverty differ across two time periods with different economic conditions (1990 to 2000 and 2000 to 2009).