Phd in ECONOMICS

Thesis title: Three essays on poverty

The present thesis is a collection of three essays on poverty - each one taking the space of a chapter - and has an empirical focus. All the works herein contained have indeed been made possible - and are based upon - an innovative dataset for Italy, the AD-HBS, that has been developed over a period spanning over a year and a half within a joint project between Direction I of the Treasury Department of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance and the Department of Economics and Law of Sapienza University of Rome. The AD-HBS dataset jointly records income, consumption expenditure, and socio-demographic information for various representative samples of the Italian population and is thus particularly well-suited to analyse poverty from multiple perspectives and in relation to some important welfare transfers. It follows that while the arguments discussed apply to advanced economies in general, all empirical applications focus on Italy, which, incidentally, is also the only European country estimating an official consumption-based absolute poverty indicator. The Italian official consumption-based absolute poverty indicator estimated by ISTAT indeed acts as the fil rouge connecting the various chapters of this thesis and allows to touch upon various aspects of poverty measurement: the pros and cons of income and consumption as proxies of household well-being in Chapter 1; the target efficiency of the recently introduced Italian minimum income scheme (RdC) in terms of the overlap between the set of beneficiaries and the set of consumption-poor households in Chapter 2; and the relation between cross-sectional consumption poverty and poverty persistence in Chapter 3. Issues related to the aggregation of households/individuals identified as poor into a synthetic index and to the axiomatic properties of different types of aggregations are instead not considered.