Reliable measures of poverty are an essential statistical tool for public policies aimed at reducing poverty. In this paper we consider the reliability of income poverty measures based on survey data which are typically plagued by missing data and measurement error. Neglecting these problems can bias the estimated poverty rates. We show how to derive upper and lower bounds for the population poverty ...
This paper investigates the interrelated dynamics of employment, cohabitation and fertility for German women and men. Using a simultaneous hazards approach due to Lillard (1993), I estimate a five-equation model with unobserved heterogeneity. One of the contributions of this paper is to include the current employment and nonemployment hazard rates and the union formation and union dissolution hazard ...
This paper explores if more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System GMM estimator and use the presumably random incidence of certain diseases as instruments for social spending levels. ...