Victor Sancibrian Publications

We develop a methodology for modeling household income processes when subjective probabilistic assessments of future income are available. This allows us to flexibly estimate conditional cdf s directly using elicited individual subjective probabilities, and to obtain empirical measurements of subjective risk and subjective persistence. We then use two longitudinal surveys collected in rural India and rural Colombia to explore the nature of perceived income dynamics in those contexts. Our results suggest linear income processes are rejected in favor of more flexible versions in both cases; subjective income distributions feature heteroskedasticity, conditional skewness and nonlinear persistence.

For a long time, the majority of economists doing empirical work relied on choice data, while
data based on answers to hypothetical questions, stated preferences or measures of subjective
beliefs were met with some skepticism. Although this has changed recently, much work needs
to be done. In this paper, we emphasize the identifying content of new economic measures. In
the first part of the paper, we discuss where the literature on measures in economics stands at
the moment. We first consider how the design and use of new measures can help identify causal
links and structural parameters under weaker assumptions than those required by approaches
based exclusively on choice data. We then discuss how the availability of new measures can
allow the study of richer models of human behavior that incorporate a wide set of factors. In
the second part of the paper, we illustrate these issues with an application to the study of risk
sharing and of deviations from perfect risk sharing.