Can Subjective Questions on Economic Welfare Be Trusted?
研究利用塔吉克斯坦、危地马拉和坦桑尼亚的专项调查，发现受访者在主观福利评分中使用不同尺度，导致主观贫困率等汇总指标存疑，但回归系数偏差较小。
While self-assessments of welfare have become popular for measuring poverty and estimating welfare effects, the methods can be deceptive given systematic heterogeneity in respondents’ scales. Little is known about this problem. We study scale heterogeneity using specially designed surveys in three countries: Tajikistan, Guatemala, and Tanzania. Respondents were asked to score stylized vignettes, as well as their own household. Diverse scales are in evidence, casting considerable doubt on the meaning of widely used summary measures such as subjective poverty rates. Nonetheless, under our identifying assumptions, only small biases are induced in the coefficients on widely used regressors for subjective poverty and welfare.