Survey nonresponse and the distribution of income

By Anton Korinek, J. Mistiaen, M. Ravallion. 2005

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The paper examines the distributional implications of selective compliance in sample surveys, whereby households with different incomes are not equally likely to participate. Poverty and inequality measurement implications are discussed for monotonically decreasing and inverted-U compliance-income relationships. We demonstrate that the latent income effect on the probability of compliance can be estimated from information on response rates across geographic areas. On implementing the method on the Current Population Survey for the U.S. we find that the compliance probability falls monotonically as income rises. Correcting for nonresponse appreciably increases mean income and inequality, but has only a small impact on poverty incidence up to poverty lines common in the U.S.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e5c3e0ba7531e4039938aa05a359c7f38740df3

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating Anti-Poverty Programs (2005, background): “This assumes that the discrepancy is distribution neutral, which is unlikely to be the case; for example, selective non-response to surveys can generate highly non-neutral errors (Korinek et al., 2005).”
Inequality and Globalization: A Review Essay (2018, background): “The bias could well be large: Korinek, Mistiaen, and Ravallion (2006) estimate that correcting for such selective compliance adds about five percentage points to the Gini index for the United States.”
Global Income Inequality in Numbers: in History and Now (2013, background): “We can conclude only indirectly (e.g. by looking at the geographical distributions of refusals as in Korinek et al., 2005) that the rich comply less.”
How Long Will It Take to Lift One Billion People Out of Poverty? (2013, background): “…(using data for the United States), selective compliance—in which the rich are less likely to participate in surveys than the poor—resulted in a sizeable underestimation of inequality using the unadjusted sample survey data but made little difference to poverty measures (Korinek et al. 2006).”
The developing world is poorer than we thought, but no less successful in the fight against poverty (2008, unknown): “34 Korinek et al. (2006) examine the implications of selective compliance and Korinek et al (2007) provide an econometric method for correcting survey data for this problem.”
Partially awakened giants : uneven growth in China and India (2006, unknown): “3 This is not necessarily the case, but there is supportive evidence for the US (Korinek et al., 2006).”
Recent trends in inequality and poverty in developing countries (2013, background): “See Deaton (2003, 2005) and Korinek et al. (2006).”