Can Subjective Questions on Economic Welfare Be Trusted?

Martin Ravallion, Kristen Himelein and Kathleen Beegle

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2016, vol. 64, issue 4, 697 - 726

Abstract: While self-assessments of welfare have become popular for measuring poverty and estimating welfare effects, the methods can be deceptive given systematic heterogeneity in respondents’ scales. Little is known about this problem. We study scale heterogeneity using specially designed surveys in three countries: Tajikistan, Guatemala, and Tanzania. Respondents were asked to score stylized vignettes, as well as their own household. Diverse scales are in evidence, casting considerable doubt on the meaning of widely used summary measures such as subjective poverty rates. Nonetheless, under our identifying assumptions, only small biases are induced in the coefficients on widely used regressors for subjective poverty and welfare.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/686793 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/686793 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/686793

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().