Post-Doctoral Scholar in Poverty Policy Analysis and Measurement
Posted: 5/13/2018 (Employment)
POSITION – The Hallie E. Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families at Oregon State University (OSU)
is seeking a postdoctoral scholar to develop a state/local poverty measure and use it to analyze Federal
and State safety net policies and their impacts. This postdoc position will focus on spearheading the
Oregon Poverty Measure (OrPM) project, a pioneering effort to create a more accurate measure of
poverty and economic hardship across Oregon’s diverse demographic and geographic landscape. Building
on other state-level poverty measure efforts in Wisconsin and California, the OrPM project involves
combining data from the American Community Survey, administrative data from the Department of
Human Services and Employment Department, and tax models. In addition to measuring poverty, the
project seeks to understand how changes in the economy and labor market, demographics, and state
polices affect the poverty rate. Oregon is a rich social laboratory to study innovative social policy and
their relationship to poverty. There will be considerable opportunity for the postdoctoral scholar to lead
research into relevant topics. Examples include minimum wage increases, expansion of the state Earned
Income Tax Credit, and a relatively generous cash assistance safety net. In addition to the cross-sectional
data linkage, we anticipate building a longitudinal panel dataset to examine questions of poverty policy
analysis and measurement over time.
Location: Oregon State University