IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/uwp/jhriss/v30y1995i1p113-134.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Measurement Error and Poverty Rates of Widows

Author

Listed:
  • Kathleen McGarry

Abstract

Estimates of the poverty rate and of the probability of entering or exiting poverty are biased when income is observed with error. I estimate a variance components model of income which contains a white noise error term and then treat this component as an approximation of the error in observed income. By comparing poverty rates calculated with and without this estimated measurement error, I conclude that observation error causes the poverty rate to be overestimated around two percentage points on average. However, eliminating observation error substantially reduces the probability of transiting either into or out of poverty. These reductions imply that the amount of permanent poverty is underestimated when measurement error is ignored.

Suggested Citation

  • Kathleen McGarry, 1995. "Measurement Error and Poverty Rates of Widows," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 30(1), pages 113-134.
    • Handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:30:y:1995:i:1:p:113-134
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/146193
    Download Restriction: A subscripton is required to access pdf files. Pay per article is available.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marchand, J. & Smeeding, T., 2016. "Poverty and Aging," Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, in: Piggott, John & Woodland, Alan (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 0, pages 905-950, Elsevier.
      • Marchand, Joseph & Smeeding, Timothy, 2016. "Poverty and Aging," Working Papers 2016-11, University of Alberta, Department of Economics, revised 20 Nov 2016.
    2. Stefan Angel & Richard Heuberger & Nadja Lamei, 2018. "Differences Between Household Income from Surveys and Registers and How These Affect the Poverty Headcount: Evidence from the Austrian SILC," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 138(2), pages 575-603, July.
    3. Daniel L. Millimet & Hao Li & Punarjit Roychowdhury, 2020. "Partial Identification of Economic Mobility: With an Application to the United States," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(4), pages 732-753, October.
    4. David R. Weir & Robert J. Willis & Purvi A. Sevak, 2002. "The Economic Consequences of Widowhood," Working Papers wp023, University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center.
    5. Nayoung Lee & Geert Ridder & John Strauss, 2017. "Estimation of Poverty Transition Matrices with Noisy Data," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(1), pages 37-55, January.
    6. Cooper, D. & McCausland, W.D. & Theodossiou, I., 2006. "The health hazards of unemployment and poor education: The socioeconomic determinants of health duration in the European Union," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 4(3), pages 273-297, December.
    7. Dr Sukhan Jackson & Nerina Vecchio, 2002. "Government Policies On Employment And Superannuation: Contradictions And Consequences For Older Australians," Discussion Papers Series 308, School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia.
    8. ChangHwan Kim & Christopher R. Tamborini, 2014. "Response Error in Earnings," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 43(1), pages 39-72, February.
    9. Namkee Ahn, "undated". "Economic Consequences of Widowhood in Europe: Cross-country and Gender Differences," Working Papers 2004-27, FEDEA.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:30:y:1995:i:1:p:113-134. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://jhr.uwpress.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.