PolicyLink and PERE
112
An Equity Profile of Orange County
Growth in jobs and earnings by industry wage level,
2000 to 2016
The analysis presented on pages 50-51 uses
our filled-in QCEW dataset (for more on the
creation of this dataset, see the previous
page, "Assembling a complete dataset on
employment and wages by industry"), and
seeks to track shifts in regional industrial job
composition and wage growth over time by
industry wage level.
Using 2000 as the base year, we classified
broad industries (at the two-digit NAICS level)
into three wage categories: low-, medium-,
and high-wage. An industry's wage category
was based on its average annual wage, and
each of the three categories contained
approximately one-third of all private
industries in the region.
We applied the 2000 industry wage category
classification across all the years in the
dataset, so that the industries within each
category remained the same over time. This
way we could track the broad trajectory of
jobs and wages in low-, medium-, and high-
wage industries.
Data and methods
This approach was adapted from a method
used in a Brookings Institution report,
Building From Strength: Creating Opportunity
in Greater Baltimore's Next Economy. For more
information, see:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/06/0426_baltimore_e
conomy_vey.pdf.
While we initially sought to conduct the
analysis at a more detailed NAICS level, the
large amount of missing data at the three- to
six-digit NAICS levels (which could not be
resolved with the method that was applied to
generate our filled-in two-digit QCEW
dataset) prevented us from doing so.
