Essays on the Poverty Dynamics of Children and their Families

Recent studies gave evidence on how a better understanding of the phenomenon of poverty is achieved by integrating the more traditional concept of cross-sectional poverty with a longitudinal concept. The increasing literature on poverty dynamics deals with the time different individuals spend in poverty and the transitions in and out of poverty. Chapter 1 is a review of the econometrical strategies that have been employed in the literature. The focus is on the econometrical derivation of each model, but I aim also at clarifying the specific research questions each model wants to answer and the related policy implications. As it is a well-established finding that families with children are over-represented at the bottom of the income distribution in many countries as well as that children who grow up in disadvantaged environments are associated with diminished cognitive and social skills, the remaining of the thesis focuses on different dynamics facets of the poverty phenomenon. In particular, Chapter 2 investigates the presence of state dependence in Italian child poverty between 1993 and 2006, while Chapter 3 is an assessment of the effect of particular families oriented policies introduced in Britain in the late 1990s on the duration of poverty experiences.