The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality (CPI), one of the country’s three national poverty centers, has built a comprehensive research program focused on measuring and explaining trends in poverty, inequality, and labor market outcomes.  This program features ten research groups (RGs) that address some of the important poverty-relevant measurement problems facing the nation.  The current infrastructure for measuring poverty is antiquated, rests on seemingly arbitrary decisions made more than a half-century ago, and typically fails to take into account all manner of “big data” developments that are revolutionizing other fields but, to date, have been largely ignored within the poverty and inequality field.  The CPI has therefore set up research groups that take on the task of building a new infrastructure for measuring trends and evaluating policy.

Poverty measurement and trends (David Betson and Kathryn Edin): The Poverty RG builds on and advances the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) as well as other new poverty measurement tools. It does so by (a) developing measurements of poverty at the city and local levels, (b) developing methods for more frequent updating of poverty and hardship measures, (c) assessing poverty in ways that better reflect whether minimum standards of health care and child care are being met, and (d) developing a new protocol for measuring trends in the everyday experience of poverty.

Trends in social mobility (Raj Chetty and Gary Solon): The second RG is charged with addressing ongoing problems in monitoring trends in economic and social mobility. For most RGs, analytic and statistical problems have been the main impediments to developing high-quality trend measurements, whereas a key obstacle in the mobility domain has long been the availability of adequate data. The CPI is solving this problem by exploiting “big data” from tax returns and other administrative sources.

Trends in educational access (Sean Reardon and Michelle Jackson): The Education RG focuses on two research agendas. The first involves monitoring trends in the effects of poverty and family background on academic achievement, and the second involves decomposing the total effects of background into a component pertaining to effects on performance (“primary effects”) and a component pertaining to effects on choices (“secondary effects”).

Recession and recovery effects (Michael Hout): The Center has an ongoing research initiative on the poverty and inequality implications of the economic downturn.  We are monitoring these effects by (a) maintaining a website hub that delivers real-time expert scholarship on the social and economic fallout of the downturn, and (b) maintaining a graphing utility that allows scholars, journalists, students, and the general public to access trend data on the effects of the recession on labor market and other social outcomes.

Trends in income inequality (David Grusky and Kim Weeden): The increase in income inequality in the U.S. continues apace, yet is far from being well understood. The purpose of the Income Inequality RG is to build an improved account of this trend by assessing whether it arises from various forms of market failure that work to generate a bloated and poorly compensated class of undereducated workers.

Trends in safety net use (Mark Duggan and Karen Jusko): The Safety Net RG is devoted to monitoring changes in government and nongovernment transfers to the poor and assessing whether these programs are meeting the needs of the poor. This RG is especially critical because transfers are playing an increasingly important role in reducing poverty in the recession and its aftermath. We are carrying out this research at the national level and within California via the California Welfare Laboratory (which is our online resource for monitoring poverty-related trends and research within and across the state).

Residential segregation (Robert Mare): The available evidence suggests that income-based residential segregation is strengthening. Although past studies differ on the details of the increase, they mainly agree that metropolitan area income segregation grew from 1970 to 2000 and that such growth was most prominent in the 1980s and among black families or households. The residential segregation RG is charged with developing a new monitoring system that allows us to better understand these and related trends in residential segregation.

Discrimination and poverty (Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll): The RG on discrimination and poverty is building new measures of labor market discrimination based on survey and field experiments. Although an influential wave of field experiments in the last 15 years has shown that discrimination is an important source of labor market disadvantage, the U.S. lacks the infrastructure for monitoring trends in the extent of such discrimination. The purpose of our new RG is to develop a regularized protocol for measuring discrimination that makes it possible (a) to compare the strength of different types of discrimination, and (b) to track trends in each type of discrimination (pertaining to the homeless, the incarcerated, working mothers, and other categories). 

Racial and ethnic inequality (C. Matthew Snipp and Daniel Lichter): The RG on racial and ethnic inequality is charged with tracking how the economic circumstances of U.S. ethnic and racial groups have evolved. It’s again surprising that a quite basic monitoring of the size of such racial and ethnic gaps is not regularly undertaken and has not been part of our standard set of social indicators. The size of racial and ethnic income gaps is changing by virtue of changes in the spatial distribution of immigrants, patterns of racial and ethnic intermarriage, the extent of racial, ethnic, and immigrant discrimination, and the extent of human capital investments by different racial and ethnic groups.

Hispanic poverty and inequality (Douglas Massey, Tomás Jiménez, Beth Mattingly, and David Grusky): Historically, Hispanics have occupied a middle position in the American socioeconomic order, not as affluent as whites but also not as poor as African Americans. This pattern began to shift in the 1980s and 1990s as the economic position of Hispanics deteriorated relative to African Americans and other groups. The objective of this RG is to document these and other key poverty and inequality trends, to begin the task of explaining what underlies them, and to then populate a new website, with the results coming out of this research.

The activities of CPI are currently supported with core funding from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. CPI is also supported with generous funding from Stanford University and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. From CPI's opening in 2006, the Elfenworks Foundation has been an especially generous supporter, and it continues to support many CPI activities. The research of CPI is also supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and other major foundations.