The key challenge in making distributional comparisons with ordinal data is the lack of commensurability of the distances between the ordered categories. This chapter provides a critical review of the most recent theoretical developments addressing this challenge and providing methods for...

The paper discusses the main issues related to negative and zero incomes that are relevant for the measurement of poverty. It shows the prevalence of non-positive incomes in high- and middle-income countries, provides an analysis of the sources and structure of these incomes, outlines the...

We examine vulnerability to poverty in Tajikistan during the global financial crisis, focusing on the roles played by international migration and remittances, using a formal, practical, and easily decomposable vulnerability measure. Our strategy is to estimate a Markov transition probability...

OLS models are the predominant choice for poverty predictions in a variety of contexts such as proxy-means tests, poverty mapping or cross-survey imputations. This paper compares the performance of econometric and machine learning models in predicting poverty using alternative objective...

Poverty prediction models are used by economists to address missing data issues in a variety of contexts such as poverty profiling, targeting with proxy-means tests, cross-survey imputations such as poverty mapping, or vulnerability analyses. Based on the models used by this literature, this...

The first aim of this paper is to clarify the differences and rela-tionships between cumulative advantage/disadvantage and the Matthew ef-fect. Its second aim, which is also its main contribution, is not only to present a new measure of the Matthew effect, but also to show how to esti-mate this...

We construct estimates of the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being for Great Britain for the years 1995 and 2005. We also produce estimates of the official British measures HBAI (from the Department for Work and Pensions annual report titled Households below Average Income) and ROI...

The at-risk-of-poverty rate, the relative income poverty indicator applied in the EU, can be highly sensitive to the equivalence scale used to transform household income to an equivalent for individuals. This study applies two well-established approaches to estimate the equivalence scale: an...

Incomes in surveys suffer from various measurement problems, most notably in the tails of their distributions. We study the prevalence of negative and zero incomes, and their implications for inequality and poverty measurement relying on 57 harmonized surveys covering 12 countries over the...

This paper utilizes two measures of subjective well-being to test a hypothesis that a marginal increase in subjective well-being associated with a marginal increase in income is larger for poorer than for richer populations. This hypothesis is examined in the setting of Slovak Roma, who are poor...