IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pre/wpaper/202185.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Equivalence Scales with Endogeneity and Base Independence

Author

Listed:
  • Steven F. Koch

    (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield, South Africa)

Abstract

This study estimates food budget share equations to calculate household equivalence scales that address both base-independence and potential endogeneity, even though an instrument that satisfies the usual exclusion restriction may not be available. The application incorporates semi-parametric methods, control functions and heteroscedasticity instrumentation. The application is founded on the most recent income and expenditure data that is available for South Africa. We find that endogeneity matters, and that failing to account for it leads to overstated equivalence scales in nearly every circumstance. When we fit our calculated scales to a typical $(A+\kappaK)^\psi$ equivalence structure via non-linear least squares, we find values of $\kappa$ near unity and values of $\psi$ mostly below 0.5. Thus, our analysis suggests that a square-root scale is more appropriate than other scales that have been used to examine poverty and inequality in South Africa.

Suggested Citation

  • Steven F. Koch, 2021. "Equivalence Scales with Endogeneity and Base Independence," Working Papers 202185, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:pre:wpaper:202185
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/61/WP/wp_2021_85.zp213348.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Steven F Koch & Naomi Setshegetso, 2020. "Catastrophic health expenditures arising from out-of-pocket payments: Evidence from South African income and expenditure surveys," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(8), pages 1-14, August.
    2. Gauthier Tshiswaka-Kashalala & Steven F Koch, 2018. "The Demand for Reproductive Health Care," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE), vol. 27(4), pages 405-429.
    3. Eric V. Edmonds & Kristin Mammen & Douglas L. Miller, 2005. "Rearranging the Family?: Income Support and Elderly Living Arrangements in a Low-Income Country," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 40(1).
    4. Ye, Yuxiang & Koch, Steven F., 2021. "Measuring energy poverty in South Africa based on household required energy consumption," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    5. Kseniya Abanokova & Hai-Anh H. Dang & Michael M. Lokshin, 2020. "The Important Role of Equivalence Scales: Household Size, Composition, and Poverty Dynamics in the Russian Federation," Working Papers 539, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    6. Margaret Grosh & Paul Glewwe, 2000. "Designing Household Survey Questionnaires for Developing Countries," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 25338, December.
    7. Dong, Yingying, 2010. "Endogenous regressor binary choice models without instruments, with an application to migration," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 107(1), pages 33-35, April.
    8. Jorge M. Aguero & Michael R. Carter & Ingrid Woolard, 2006. "The Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers on Nutrition: The South African Child Support Grant," SALDRU Working Papers 8, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
    9. Syed Abul Hasan, 2016. "Engel curves and equivalence scales for Bangladesh," Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(2), pages 301-315, April.
    10. Angela Daley & Thesia Garner & Shelley Phipps & Eva Sierminska, 2020. "Differences across countries and time in household expenditure patterns: implications for the estimation of equivalence scales," International Review of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(6), pages 734-757, November.
    11. Aaberge, Rolf & Melby, Ingrid, 1998. "The Sensitivity of Income Inequality to Choice of Equivalence Scales," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 44(4), pages 565-569, December.
    12. Murray Leibbrandt & Ingrid Woolard & Arden Finn & Jonathan Argent, 2010. "Trends in South African Income Distribution and Poverty since the Fall of Apartheid," OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 101, OECD Publishing.
    13. repec:taf:jnlbes:v:30:y:2012:i:1:p:67-80 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Guido W. Imbens & Whitney K. Newey, 2009. "Identification and Estimation of Triangular Simultaneous Equations Models Without Additivity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 77(5), pages 1481-1512, September.
    15. Munoz Boudet,Ana Maria & Buitrago,Paola & Leroy De La Briere,Benedicte & Newhouse,David Locke & Rubiano Matulevich,Eliana Carolina & Scott,Kinnon & Suarez Becerra,Pablo, 2018. "Gender differences in poverty and household composition through the life-cycle : a global perspective," Policy Research Working Paper Series 8360, The World Bank.
    16. Hayfield, Tristen & Racine, Jeffrey S., 2008. "Nonparametric Econometrics: The np Package," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 27(i05).
    17. Donaldson, David & Pendakur, Krishna, 2006. "The Identification of Fixed Costs From Consumer Behavior," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 24, pages 255-265, July.
    18. J. L. Nicholson, 1976. "Appraisal Of Different Methods Of Estimating Equivalence Scales And Their Results," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 22(1), pages 1-11, March.
    19. James Banks & Richard Blundell & Arthur Lewbel, 1997. "Quadratic Engel Curves And Consumer Demand," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 79(4), pages 527-539, November.
    20. Ataguba, John Ele-Ojo, 2012. "Reassessing catastrophic health-care payments with a Nigerian case study," Health Economics, Policy and Law, Cambridge University Press, vol. 7(3), pages 309-326, July.
    21. Rolf Aaberge & Ingrid Melby, 1998. "The Sensitivity Of Income Inequality To Choice Of Equivalence Scales," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 44(4), pages 565-569, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Ahunov, Muzaffarjon & Kakhkharov, Jakhongir & Mozumder, Pallab, 2022. "Income and household energy consumption in a transition economy: The case of Uzbekistan," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 254(PA).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Steven F. Koch & Evelyn Thsehla, 2022. "The impact of diabetes on labour market outcomes," Development Southern Africa, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(3), pages 424-456, May.
    2. Christian Dudel & Jan Marvin Garbuszus & Julian Schmied, 2021. "Assessing differences in household needs: a comparison of approaches for the estimation of equivalence scales using German expenditure data," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 60(4), pages 1629-1659, April.
    3. Jan Marvin Garbuszus & Notburga Ott & Sebastian Pehle & Martin Werding, 2018. "Development of Family Income since the 1990s: A Fresh Look at German Microdata Using Income-Dependent Equivalence Scales," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 987, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    4. Steven F. Koch, 2022. "Basic Needs (In)Security and Subjective Equivalence Scales," Working Papers 202259, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    5. Ye, Yuxiang & Koch, Steven F., 2021. "Measuring energy poverty in South Africa based on household required energy consumption," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    6. Christos Koulovatianos & Carsten Schröder, 2022. "Income-Dependent Equivalence Scales and Choice Theory: Implications for Poverty Measurement," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 1157, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    7. Yuxiang Ye & Steven F. Koch & Jiangfeng Zhang, 2020. "Modelling Required Energy Consumption with Equivalence Scales," Working Papers 202014, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.
    8. Timm Bönke & Carsten Schröder, 2007. "Inequality and welfare estimates using two alternative weighting schemes," LIS Working papers 463, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    9. Christian Dudel & Julian Schmied, 2019. "Pension adequacy standards: an empirical estimation strategy and results for the United States and Germany," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2019-003, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    10. Christian Dudel & Jan Marvin Garbuszus & Notburga Ott & Martin Werding, 2015. "Income Dependent Equivalence Scales, Inequality, and Poverty," CESifo Working Paper Series 5568, CESifo.
    11. Aimable Nsabimana & Ranjula Bali Swain & Yves Surry & Jean Chrysostome Ngabitsinze, 2020. "Income and food Engel curves in Rwanda: a household microdata analysis," Agricultural and Food Economics, Springer;Italian Society of Agricultural Economics (SIDEA), vol. 8(1), pages 1-20, December.
    12. Bente Halvorsen, 2009. "Conflicting Interests in Environmental Policy-making?," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 44(2), pages 287-305, October.
    13. Bodory, Hugo & Huber, Martin, 2018. "The causalweight package for causal inference in R," FSES Working Papers 493, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland.
    14. Marisa Coetzee, 2013. "Finding the Benefits: Estimating the Impact of The South African Child Support Grant," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 81(3), pages 427-450, September.
    15. Yingying Dong & Arthur Lewbel, 2015. "A Simple Estimator for Binary Choice Models with Endogenous Regressors," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(1-2), pages 82-105, February.
    16. Markus Frölich & Martin Huber, 2017. "Direct and indirect treatment effects–causal chains and mediation analysis with instrumental variables," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 79(5), pages 1645-1666, November.
    17. de Ree, Joppe & Alessie, Rob & Pradhan, Menno, 2013. "The price and utility dependence of equivalence scales: Evidence from Indonesia," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 272-281.
    18. Christoph Breunig & Stefan Hoderlein, 2016. "Nonparametric Specification Testing in Random Parameter Models," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 897, Boston College Department of Economics.
    19. Christoph Breunig & Stefan Hoderlein, 2018. "Specification testing in random coefficient models," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 9(3), pages 1371-1417, November.
    20. Marcel Fafchamps & Agnes R. Quisumbing & IFPRI, 2006. "Household Formation and Marriage Markets," Economics Series Working Papers GPRG-WPS-039, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:pre:wpaper:202185. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: . General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/decupza.html .

    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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Rangan Gupta (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/decupza.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.