World income inequality databases: an assessment of WIID and SWIID
By S. Jenkins. Journal of Economic Inequality, 2015
240 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article assesses two secondary data compilations about income inequality – the World Income Inequality Database (WIIDv2c), and the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIIDv4.0) which is based on WIID but with all observations multiply-imputed. WIID and SWIID are convenient and accessible sources for researchers seeking cross-national data with global coverage for relatively long time periods. Against these undoubted benefits must be set costs arising from lack of data comparability and quality and also, in the case of SWIID, questions about its imputation model. WIID and SWIID users need to recognize this benefit-cost trade-off and ensure their substantive conclusions are robust to potential data problems. I provide detailed description of the nature and contents of both sources plus illustrative regression analysis. From a data issues perspective, I recommend WIID over SWIID, though my support for use of WIID is conditional.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f2452e36a1b0694629700f32ee1cec0c1f1a8ac
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Citations in the corpus
- Finance and Income Inequality: A Review and New Evidence (2017, unknown): “SWIID is based on WIID, but is supplemented by other sources and has all of its observations multiply‐imputed (Jenkins, 2015).”
- The economics of the democratic deficit: The effect of IMF programs on inequality (2016, background): “…concern that global cycles of growth and crises could influence both the IMF’s liquidity ratio and inequality differently in countries with different IMF participation histories (see 18 This robustness test is relevant as the SWIID’s imputation approach is sometimes criticized (Jenkins 2015).”