Smallholder farming dominates agriculture in poorer countries. Yet, traditional recall-based surveys on smallholder farming in these countries face challenges with seasonal variations, high survey costs, poor record-keeping, and technical capacity constraints resulting in significant recall...

Monitoring soil quality provides indispensable inputs for effective policy advice, but very few poorer countries can implement high-quality surveys on soil. We offer an alternative, low-cost imputation-based approach to generating various soil quality indicators. The estimation results validate...

The increasing growth of forced displacement worldwide has led to the stronger interest of various stakeholders in measuring poverty among refugee populations. However, refugee data remain scarce, particularly in relation to the measurement of income, consumption, or expenditure. This paper...

The central vs. local nature of high-school exit exam systems can have important repercussions on the labor market. By increasing the informational content of grades, central exams may improve the sorting of students by productivity. To test this, we exploit the unique German setting where...

We propose a new method for using validation data to correct self-reported weight and height in surveys that do not weigh and measure respondents. The standard correction from prior research regresses actual measures on reported values using an external validation dataset, and then uses the...

Recent validation studies show that survey misreporting is pervasive and biases common analyses. Addressing this problem is further complicated, because validation data are usually convenience samples and access is restricted, making them more suitable to document than to solve the problem. I...

This paper explores the dynamics of income and poverty of rural Indian households, 1994-2005. The estimation strategy consists of convergence analysis to test whether poor households are catching-up in terms of income, followed by transition analysis to test whether poor households are more...

We designed an experiment to explore the extent of measurement error in body mass index (BMI), when based on self-reported body weight and height. We find that there is a systematic age gradient in the reporting error in BMI, while there is limited evidence of systematic associations with...

The economics of obesity literature implicitly assumes that measured anthropometrics are error-free and they are often treated as a gold standard when compared to self-reported data. We use factor mixture models to analyse and characterize measurement error in both self-reported and measured...

Meijer, Rohwedder, and Wansbeek (MRW, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, 2012) develop methods for prediction of a single earnings figure per worker from mixture factor models fitted using earnings data from multiple linked data sources. MRW apply their method using parameter estimates...