Overview
James X. Sullivan is an economist at the University of Notre Dame Department of Economics. He is a leading researcher on consumption-based poverty measurement and the material well-being of disadvantaged families. His long-running collaboration with Bruce D. Meyer produced the foundational empirical case that consumption data better reflect welfare for low-resource households than income data, and documented the severe underreporting of government transfers in U.S. household surveys.
Key Contributions / Features
- Meyer and Sullivan (2003): "Measuring the Well-Being of the Poor Using Income and Consumption" — established that hardship indicators correlate more strongly with consumption than income for low-resource families; foundational methodological paper.
- Meyer and Sullivan (2008): Documented the consumption-income divergence for single mothers 1993–2003; showed modest consumption gains despite falling income at the bottom; introduced the nonmarket time break-even calculation for welfare reform evaluation.
- Meyer and Sullivan (2011): Follow-up extending the analysis and establishing the consumption-based poverty rate as more stable and lower than income-based rates.
- Meyer, Mok, and Sullivan (2007): "The Under-Reporting of Transfers in Household Surveys" — quantified program-specific underreporting rates, showing SSDI/SSI and AFDC/TANF are each underreported by ~20–40% in standard household surveys.
Related