The escape from poverty among rural and urban elders

Abstract

Do poor elders ever really leave poverty? We explore the prevalence and nature of exits from poverty among poor elders, with special attention to rural-urban differences in this regard. Analyzing twenty years of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that 40% of poor elders leave poverty after one year. However, descriptive data suggest many of these exits resulted from small increases in income that merely nudged elders over the poverty line. Nonmetropolitan elders are less likely to exit poverty than their metropolitan counterparts, and this disadvantage widened when statistical controls were applied in multivariate models.