Survey misreporting is known to be pervasive and bias common statistical analyses. In this paper, I first use administrative data on SNAP receipt and amounts linked to American Community Survey data from New York State to show that survey data can misrepresent the program in important ways. For...

The Luxembourg Income Study (now known as LIS) provides public access for research purposes to harmonized unit-record data sets for multiple countries, in addition to providing summary statistics from those data, including poverty and inequality measures. LIS is a well-managed and undeniably...

The present research aims to compare and improve the measurement and, therefore, the definition of what "middle class" represents, for a group of countries in Latin America, namely Colombia,Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Ecuador, using a methodology based on the expenditure of households, compared to...

This paper examines the quality of data collected in the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey, which is the source for the Consumer Price Index weights and is the main source of U.S. consumption microdata. We compare reported spending on a large number of categories of goods and services to...

In India, over the years, the progress in women’s nutritional status has been less impressive and remains as a major problem for health policy. The dual burden of nutritional disorder of women in India is posing a serious challenge not only for nutritional policy but also for socio-economic...

We use matched survey and administrative data to study interviewer and interview related determinants of misreporting on welfare receipt in interviews. In our data, 12.2 % of German welfare recipients underreport benefit receipt. We find that underreporting is more likely in formal and...

This article investigates the change in the living standards and inequalities in Dar Es Salaam. Two publicly available micro data sets are used to estimate the household expenditures in 1991 and 1996. Based on the estimated expenditures, living standards and inequalities are quantitatively...

This paper studies the impact of changes in the external balance of Pakistan. We explain why the economic growth achieved during the past decade was highly dependent on improvements in the external balance. Between 2001 and 2007, Pakistan benefited from an increase in remittances, foreign...

Using seven Bolivian household surveys conducted between 1999 and 2007, this paper provides a different picture of poverty dynamics in Bolivia. Consistent and accurate estimates of consumption are computed and used to create poverty profiles. Challenging the previous income-based poverty trend,...

In this paper, we characterize and empirically implement robust normative criteria for comparing societies on the basis of their allocations of risks among their members. Risks are modelled as lotteries on the set of distributions of state-contingent pecuniary consequences. Individuals are...