Income Distribution in Urban China: An Overlooked Data Inconsistency Issue

Hailong Jin, Hang Qian, Tong Wang and Eun Choi

Staff General Research Papers Archive from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The Urban Household Income and Expenditure Surveys, conducted by National Bureau of Statistics, are extensively explored in income distribution studies. However, we find that a survey coverage expansion that includes migrant residents in the urban sample may induce serious data inconsistency before and after the year 2002. To further unveil the inconsistency, we construct a random walk hierarchical beta-2 distribution model, estimated by the unscented Kalman filter, to investigate the magnitude of the structural break. Results show that the gaps of Gini coefficients and the shape of the distribution can be bridged by a counterfactual time series that coherently measures the urban China income distribution

Keywords: income distribution; China; sampling inconsistency; unscented Kalman filter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C46 D31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03-07
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Income distribution in urban China: An overlooked data inconsistency issue (2014)
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