Anchoring Measurement of the Middle‐Income Class to Subjective Evaluation
提出一种基于有序逻辑模型的新方法，利用个人自我报告的阶级评价来确定中产阶级的收入边界，并以哈萨克斯坦2003-2015年数据为例进行估计。
What constitutes the middle class is hotly debated. Following an income‐based approach, a main issue concerns how to fix the income boundaries that define the middle‐income tier. This paper offers a novel model‐based approach to the use of self‐reported class evaluation for identifying those boundaries. The self‐declared status responses are modeled using a non‐conventional parametrization of an ordered logistic model. In this parametrization, the cut‐points of the model are directly interpretable as income boundaries, and the variance of the errors captures the idiosyncratic heterogeneity of the outcome variable. The use of subjective data is exemplified in the estimation of the middle class in Kazakhstan over the period 2003–2015.