Apples to Oranges: Imputing Household Income Using Survey Data (with Pedro Torres & Roberto Vélez-Grajales)
Accurate measures of household income are essential for socioeconomic research and policymaking, but survey data often lack income information. Two common approaches to mitigate this problem are asset-based indices and survey-to-survey imputations. Asset-based indices reflect long-term consumption patterns, which show less variance and inequality than income. Survey-to-survey imputations, particularly through the multiple imputation procedure, predict the income distribution in such surveys. This procedure introduces a potential source of bias in inequality of opportunity analysis by randomly adding error terms to the prediction to recover some of the variance lost in the prediction process, thus randomly shifting individuals in the conditional income distribution with respect to variables not used in the prediction, such as parental background. We propose an alternative imputation method that considers individuals' relative predicted position in the distribution to introduce variance. We validated our method across ENIGH survey waves and found it robust across different specifications. Finally, we apply it to the EMOVI 2017 and compare it with an asset index-based approach and the traditional imputation technique. We find a downward bias in the multiple imputation procedure when considering IOp estimates compared to our estimation. Our approach provides an alternative solution for imputing income data that avoids shifting individuals in the conditional (on circumstances) income distribution.
Missing Mothers: The Impact of Excluding Mothers' Socioeconomic Standing on Estimates of Intergenerational Mobility (with Juliana de Castro Galvao and Luisa Nazareno)
The Poor Stay Poor: Intergenerational Poverty in Mexico and Its Regions (with Roberto Vélez-Grajales)
The Intergenerational Mobility of Single-Mother Children: Evidence from México (with Paloma Villagómez-Ornelas)
The Great Capital and Labor Divide. Compositional Inequality in Latin America (with Marco Ranaldi)
Precarious Employment in Mexico in the XXIst Century (with Kate Moody)
Working hours in Mexico in the XXIst Century (with Sophia Normark)
Unfair Inequality in the Tropics.
Measuring Multidimensional Unfair Inequality.