This paper analyzes the impact of macroeconomic activity on the level of poverty in the U.S. economy. The authors us e a macroeconometric model of poverty in the United States where the rat e of poverty is presumed to depend upon changes in various indicators of macroeconomic performance and policy. The authors empirically model the relationship between poverty and the macroeconomy with a hybrid mode l that employs a reduced-form model to capture the dynamic interaction s among the data and a structural economic model to describe the contemporaneous relationship between the variables.