THE TIME LAG IN ANNUAL HOUSEHOLD-BASED INCOME MEASURES: ASSESSING AND CORRECTING THE BIAS

Annual income data are typically provided with a time lag. This article reviews several ways of dealing with this time lag in the construction of annual household-based income measures for individual economic well-being. It also proposes an alternative method that yields better estimates for equivalized household income, especially in the case of household composition change. Next, the two most commonly applied income measures are compared to this alternative measure with empirical income data from the European Community Household Panel. This comparison reveals that ignoring the time lag and household changes leads to substantial bias in income and poverty estimates and to erroneous conclusions about the determinants of poverty entry. The evidence in this article will be useful to researchers who want to make a well-informed choice between different annual income measures.     

Revising the myth of gay consumer innovativeness

Non-academic literature often refers to gay people as innovators, but academic evidence is lacking. To test whether gays and heterosexuals differ in innate and realized innovativeness, and whether the relationships between the variables in an innovativeness model differ for both groups, 833 Flemish respondents from a homosexual-tolerant region (i.e., Flanders) filled out a questionnaire that was posted on forums and newsgroups targeted at either a general or a homosexual population. MANOVA results reveal an important interaction effect between gender and sexual orientation. The gay men in the study are slightly more innovative than the heterosexual men, but the opposite holds true for the gay and heterosexual women. The relations between the constructs in the innovativeness model do not differ for the different groups.