Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Abstract

This paper examines whether, in the absence of information on household income or consumption, data on household infrastructure, building materials, and ownership of certain durable assets can be used to measure inequality in living standards. Principal components analysis is used to obtain a relative measure of inequality, and a bootstrap prediction method is provided for use when auxiliary surveys are available. Mexican data is used to show that the inequality methods provided do provide reasonable proxies for inequalities in living standards. An application finds that after controlling for household income and demographics, school attendance of boys in Mexico is negatively related to state-level inequality.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David J. McKenzie.

Additional information

I thank Hugo Ñopo, two anonymous referees, and participants at the VI Meetings of the LACEA/IDB/World Bank Network on Inequality and Poverty in Puebla, Mexico for useful comments. Alberto Diaz-Cayeros provided helpful insight into political economy of Mexico's educational funding system.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

McKenzie, D. . Measuring inequality with asset indicators. J Popul Econ 18, 229–260 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-005-0224-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-005-0224-7

JEL Classification

Keywords

Navigation