SFB 303 Discussion Paper No. A - 346

Author:  Gyarfas, Gabor, and Hermann Quinke
 
Title:  Ein Verfahren zur Konstruktion synthetischer Mikrodaten aus  
aggregierten Stukturinformationen
 
Abstract:  Simulation analyses of the tax-transfer system require  
disaggregated data. If microdata are not available - e.g. because 
of privacy issues - often a large number of published tables 
(aggregate structural information) can be utilized. In addition to  
these "hard" data there are frequently more or less "soft" prior  
notions based on other (older or foreign) data sources or simply 
on ad hoc reasoning. Our paper presents a method for the construction 
of synthetic microdata from aggregate structural information and a prior 
distribution. Such a database is not only consistent with the available 
information, but it also has desirable statistical properties in the 
case of large samples. We prove that the empirical distributions  
corresponding to the synthetic samples converge to the distribution 
that is consistent with the aggregate information and maximizes the 
entropy relative to the prior distribution. Two small Monte Carlo  
experiments illustrate this proposition. 
 
Keywords:  
 
JEL-Classification-Number: 
 
Creation-Date:  October, 1991 
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