Showing 1 - 8 of 8
Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose error is plausibly independent of the measurement errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453295
The traditional approach to poverty measurement puts no explicit weight on success at increasing the typical level of living of the poorest--raising the consumption floor. To address this deficiency, the paper defines and measures the expected value of the floor, allowing for transient effects...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457875
The paper critically assesses prevailing measures of global poverty. A welfarist interpretation of global poverty lines is augmented by the idea of normative functionings, the cost of which varies across countries. In this light, current absolute measures are seen to ignore important social...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480155
We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distribution of Income and estimate poverty rates, poverty counts and various measures of income inequality and welfare. Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463216
Current global inequality measures assume that national-mean income does not matter to economic welfare at given household income, as measured in surveys. The paper questions that assumption on theoretical and empirical grounds and finds that prominent stylized facts about global inequality are...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453536
The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453972
Proxy-means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information. In a now widely-used version, a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy-means test score based on chosen covariates, which is then implemented for targeting out-of-sample. In this paper, the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012455761
Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014512057