Household expenditure survey data cannot yield precise estimates of poverty or inequality for small areas for which no or few observations are available. Census data are more plentiful, but typically exclude income and expenditure data. Recent years have seen a widespread use of small-area...

Applied economists are often interested in studying changes over time of important economic indicators, such as inequality or poverty, but such comparisons can be made impossible by changes in data collection methodology. We describe an easily implemented procedure to recover comparability that...

We develop an intuitive and easily implemented procedure to recover comparability over time of statistics computed using databases made incomparable by changes in survey design. Our methodology can be adopted whenever the statistic of interest satisfies a certain simple moment condition. The...