Measuring Regional Inequality by Internet Car Price Advertisements: Evidence for Germany

Konstantin Kholodilin () and Boriss Siliverstovs

No 10-261, KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich

Abstract: We suggest to use Internet car sale price advertisements for measuring economic inequality between and within German regions. Our estimates of regional income levels and Gini indices based on advertisements are highly, positively correlated with the official figures. This implies that the observed car prices can serve as a reasonably good proxy for income levels. In contrast to the traditional measures, our data can be fast and inexpensively retrieved from the web, and more importantly allow to estimate Gini indices at the NUTS2 level - something that never has been done before. Our approach to measuring regional inequality is a useful alternative source of information that could complement the officially available measures.

Keywords: Car price advertisements; Economic inequality; German NUTS1 and NUTS regions; Gini index; Internet (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2010-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-ict and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-010705429 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring regional inequality by internet car price advertisements: Evidence for Germany (2012)
Working Paper: Measuring Regional Inequality by Internet Car Price Advertisements: Evidence for Germany (2012)
Working Paper: Measuring Regional Inequality by Internet Car Price Advertisements: Evidence for Germany (2010)
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:kof:wpskof:10-261

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().