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Eliciting, Applying And Exploring Multidimensional Welfare Weights: Evidence From The Field

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  • Lucio Esposito
  • Enrica Chiappero‐Martinetti

Abstract

By combining primary data on dimension importance collected in the field from three different samples and nationally representative survey data from the Dominican Republic, we offer a twofold contribution. The first one comes from an unincentivized questionnaire experiment, where the significance of the treatment effect shows that life domains are valued differently in a poverty vs a well‐being framework. This poses important questions on the anatomy of dimension importance and on the use of weights in empirical analyses, and opens the door to what we call a “concordance paradox” related to the very essence of the constructs of poverty and well‐being. As a second contribution, we employ the sets of weights collected in the field to assess the trend of multidimensional poverty and well‐being in the country. We find that the picking one set of weights or another is not a trivial choice, as they lead to opposite assessment results.

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  • Lucio Esposito & Enrica Chiappero‐Martinetti, 2019. "Eliciting, Applying And Exploring Multidimensional Welfare Weights: Evidence From The Field," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 65(S1), pages 204-227, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:revinw:v:65:y:2019:i:s1:p:s204-s227
    DOI: 10.1111/roiw.12407
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    1. Dutta, Indranil & Nogales, Ricardo & Yalonetzky, Gaston, 2021. "Endogenous weights and multidimensional poverty: A cautionary tale," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    2. Jhonatan Clausen & Nicolas Barrantes, 2022. "Developing a Comprehensive Multidimensional Wellbeing Index Based on What People Value: An Application to a Middle-Income Country," Applied Research in Quality of Life, Springer;International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, vol. 17(6), pages 3253-3283, December.
    3. Tomson Ogwang, 2022. "The regression approach to the measurement and decomposition of the multidimensional Watts poverty index," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 20(4), pages 951-973, December.
    4. Chang-ming Hsieh & Qiguang Li & Houchao Lyu, 2020. "A Comparison of Normalized and Non-Normalized Multiplicative Subjective Importance Weighting in Quality of Life Measurement," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 152(2), pages 637-651, November.

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