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The New York RDRC

The New York Retirement and Disability Research Center (NY-RDRC) focuses on structural health, wealth, and life course processes that yield opportunities and social and economic stratification. It also focuses on the complexities associated with today’s disparities arising from the larger political economy, geographical divides between urban, suburban, and rural places, the changing workplace and nature of employment, and climate instability.   

Bringing together Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) within the City University of New York (CUNY) – the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR) and the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging – with the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) at The New School, the center is uniquely situated to address these concerns by bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship and methods from demography, economics, public health, social gerontology, sociology, and urban planning.

RDRC Research Project: Poverty Among Older Adults According to the Principal Poverty Measure

On March 29, 2023, a NAS Panel issued a report recommending major changes to Census Bureau poverty measures (NAS 2023). The Panel’s recommended measure, the Principal Poverty Measure (PPM), would replace the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and the official poverty measure (OPM) and become the headline Federal poverty statistic. It recommended changes to the treatment of housing, health insurance and health care, the largest components of the poverty threshold, particularly for the older population. The proposed research would be the first to implement a pilot PPM and use it to estimate poverty rates for the US, and to estimate impacts of health insurance benefits, Social Security, housing assistance and other social insurance and benefits on poverty across the life course. It will estimate poverty disparities across demographic groups defined by age, racial and Hispanic identification, urbanicity, gender and living arrangements (for the household population) and others. It will estimate benefit and program impacts on poverty rates and poverty gaps, as well as differential impacts across groups. It will show how the choice of poverty measure (PPM, anchored PPM, SPM) shapes the understanding of US poverty and how it differs across the age distribution: the demographic composition of the poor, the level of poverty, poverty disparities and program impacts. It will provide measures of direct impacts of health insurance benefits (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid) unavailable with the SPM. The PPM will use improved methods to capture geographic differences in housing costs. The PPM holds promise to provide a more accurate description of US poverty and a more accurate accounting of the impacts of social and health insurance benefits and other transfers. 

Primary Duties of the Research Assistant

Working with the Project PI, Senior Research Associate, and Project Consultant the Research Assistant will: 

1. Using HUD data files, construct the geographically-aggregated population-weighted HUD Fair Market Rents (FMRs) for all geographic areas represented in the CPS ASEC Public Use File for each year, 2018-2022, for units with all the numbers of rooms included in the HUD data. 

2. Create separate version(s) of this file based on the FMRs for new leases and for all leases. 

3. Work with the project consultant to estimate prediction equations for homeowners’ maintenance, home insurance, interest payments and property taxes using one or more of the following data sources American Housing Survey; Survey of Consumer Finances, Consumer Expenditure Survey and American Community Survey.