This paper applies an innovative method to estimate poverty in India in the absence of recent expenditure data. The method utilizes expenditure data from 2004-05, 2009-10, and 2011-12 to impute household expenditure into a survey of durable goods expenditure conducted in 2014-15. At the $1.90...

Proxy means test (PMT) poverty targeting tools have become common tools for beneficiary targeting and poverty assessment where full means tests are costly. Currently popular estimation procedures for generating these tools prioritize minimization of in-sample prediction errors; however, the...