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Improved estimates of poverty of place for the United States: A county-level Supplemental Poverty Measure Darcy Sullivan*, Darcy Sullivan, Jesse Shircliff, Matthew Brooks, Regina Baker, J. Tom Mueller,

Properly capturing poverty across space in the United States remains challenging. Although national estimates of poverty using modern and robust measures are available, when working at the sub-state level researchers are forced to rely upon the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) of the United States—a measure widely viewed as problematic and limited. The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), developed in response to the shortcomings of the OPM, has increasingly supplanted the OPM within research and policy analysis. However, the SPM is functionally tied to the Current Population Survey and its publicly available geographies, meaning that sub-state estimates of the SPM (e.g. county) are unavailable. In this paper, we present new county-level estimates of the SPM using restricted access version of the American Community Survey and Current Population Survey. Beyond providing poverty estimates at a scale previously unavailable, we also address another limitation of the SPM related to its coarse geographic adjustment for cost of living by introducing a new geographic adjustment at the scale of the commuting zone. In the remainder of the paper, we assess the validity of our estimates by comparing our estimates to previous estimates and other measures.

Key words: poverty measurement, validation, restricted-access data, geographic variation