The Working Poor: Lousy Jobs or Lazy Workers?

Marlene Kim
Additional contact information
Marlene Kim: The Jerome Levy Economics Institute

Macroeconomics from EconWPA

Abstract: This paper investigates the argument that the working poor are poor because they work too few hours. I find that although working additional hours reduces the chance of poverty, most of full-time and year-round, due to the low wages they receive. In addition, of those who could climb out of poverty by working year-round, many are unable to do so, due to disability, age, or poor who could potentially escape poverty by working 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year.

JEL-codes: E (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: Written 1997-12-09
Note: Type of Document - Acrobat PDF; prepared on IBM PC; to print on PostScript; pages: 25; figures: included
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://129.3.20.41/eps/mac/papers/9712/9712002.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Macroeconomics from EconWPA
Series data maintained by EconWPA ().