Imputing total expenditures from a non-exhaustive list of items: An empirical assessment using the SAVE data set

Content General purpose surveys typically refrain from using an exhaustive list of consumption expenditure items since the gain of more precise data on consumption is usually more than offset by the large increase in interview time and respondent effort which reduces re-sponse willingness. An alternative is to ask respondents a non-exhaustive list of consumption expenditure items and use those items to impute total consumption by the use of an external data source. This paper uses the SAVE (internal) and EVS (external) data sets to apply such a procedure.