Spatial Context and Poverty: Area-Level Effects and Micro-Level Effects on Household Poverty in the Texas Borderland & Lower Mississippi Delta: United States, 2006

Abstract

This paper uses microdata from the 2006 American Community Survey for households in the Texas Borderland and Mississippi Delta to examine the effects of spatial location context on the odds of households being in poverty. We examine the micro-level and area-level effects of poverty among households located in the two regions. We estimate a series of multilevel regression models predicting the log odds of a household being in poverty. Our major contribution is the demonstration that areal context characteristics have statistically significant effects on the likelihood of households being in poverty. Spatial context matters when it comes to predicting poverty of the households in the Delta and Borderland.