Vulnerability to poverty revisited: flexible modeling and better predictive performance

Maike Hohberg, Katja Landau, Thomas Kneib, Stephan Klasen and Walter Zucchini

No 240, Courant Research Centre: Poverty, Equity and Growth - Discussion Papers from Courant Research Centre PEG

Abstract: This paper analyzes several modifications to improve a simple measure of vulnerability as expected poverty. Firstly, in order to model income, we apply distributional regression relating potentially each parameter of the conditional income distribution to the covariates. Secondly, we determine the vulnerability cutoff endogenously instead of defining a household as vulnerable if its probability of being poor in the next period is larger than 0.5. For this purpose, we employ the receiver operating characteristic curve that is able to consider prerequisites according to a particular targeting mechanism. Using long-term panel data from Germany, we build both mean and distributional regression models with the established 0.5 probability cutoff and our vulnerability cutoff. We find that our new cutoff considerably increases predictive performance. Placing the income regression model into the distributional regression framework does not improve predictions further but has the advantage of a coherent model where parameters are estimated simultaneously replacing the original three step estimation approach.

Keywords: vulnerability to poverty; distributional regression; generalized additive model for location; scale and shape; receiver operating characteristic curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C18 C52 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.vwl.wiso.uni-goettingen.de/courant-papers/CRC-PEG_DP_240.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Vulnerability to poverty revisited: Flexible modeling and better predictive performance (2018)
Journal Article: Vulnerability to poverty revisited: Flexible modeling and better predictive performance (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:got:gotcrc:240

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Courant Research Centre: Poverty, Equity and Growth - Discussion Papers from Courant Research Centre PEG Platz der Goettinger Sieben 3; D-37073 Goettingen, GERMANY.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dominik Noe ().