Macroeconomy and the well-being of low income African American families

By employing unit root testing and cointegration procedures, this paper is the first study of its kind to present empirical evidence showing higher inflation rate, lower unemployment, and increased real per capita gross domestic product decreased the poverty rate among African American families during the 1966-99 period. The findings, estimated using the Phillips-Hansen fully modified OLS estimator, are also consistent with results obtained using Johansen's maximum likelihood cointegration procedure. Long-run Granger causality, inferred by the estimated error-correction model, suggests that the African American poverty rate is not weakly exogenous and will respond to policy intervention.