This project sets out to explore the role of place in ‘determining’ income. This has been made possible only by the completion of the recent large-scale Census Rehearsal, which included a question on income. As a result, for the first time in the UK a dataset exists that captures the income of individual located within spatially contiguous households.

In particular, the project has three key objectives:

1. An evaluation of extant and currently proposed methods of small-area income imputation
2. An evaluation of the use of other Census-based measures as proxies for income (e.g. car ownership; social class; deprivation indices)
3. An assessment of the effectiveness of incorporating non-Census information in the small-area income imputation process, looking in particular at the role of house prices, as measured by council tax bands.

The results from the project are to be fed back to the Census Offices and other users to better inform strategies for estimating (and imputing) individual, household and small-area level incomes