By Manuel Pastor Jr. and Justin Scoggins
http://cjtc.ucsc.edu/docs/r_golden_state.pdf
In response to rising in low-wage employment and increasing debate over
the issue of "working poverty", this report closely examines the impact
that a variety of ways of defining working poverty have on our
perception of the size and composition of the working poor in
California. By taking advantage of the unusually detailed information
that is available in the 1990 and 2000 Public Use Microdata Samples
(PUMS), the demographic, geographic, and labor market dimensions of
working poverty are compared and contrasted across 18 different
definitions, while at the same time providing estimates of the extent,
nature, and trajectory of the problem.
The result is an uncovering of biases that exist under some of the
definitions that have been used to measure working poverty and a
recommended "best" definition for the state that is both politically
feasible and computationally practical, along with a detailing the
characterization of working poverty in California and its regions in
2000 and the rise in working poverty that took place over the 1990s.
