Identification precision of vulnerability to poverty indexes: does information quantity matter?

Vulnerability to poverty has been proposed in the literature as an ex ante measure of poverty risk useful for the identification of those who may fall into poverty in the future (Zhang and Guanghua 2008). This paper complements the existing literature on vulnerability measures, by investigating empirically how indexes precision varies according to the quantity of information available, in order to understand which is the best predictor of poverty conditional on data at hand. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we show that information quantity affects differently the predictive power of indexes.