This paper investigates the accuracy of recall data by comparing administrative records with retrospective, self-reported survey responses to income and asset questions for a sample of self-employed households from coastal India. It finds that the magnitude of the recall error increases over...

Despite the importance of agriculture to economic development, and a vast accompanying literature on the subject, little research has been done on data quality. Due to survey logistics, agricultural data are usually collected by asking respondents to recall the details of events occurring during...

Although good and timely information on agricultural production is critical for policy-decisions, the quality of underlying data is often low and improving data quality could have high payoff. We use data from a production diary, administered concurrently with a standard household survey in...

Despite that insect-resistant Bt cotton has been lauded for its ability to reduce the use of pesticides, studies have shown that Chinese Bt cotton farmers continue to use excessive amounts of pesticides. Using results from a survey and an artefactual field experiment, we find that farmers who...

Economic policies are often judged by a handful of statistics, some of which may be biased during periods of change. We estimate the income growth implied by the evolution of food demand and durable good ownership in post-reform Brazil and Mexico, and find that changes in consumption patterns...

In the context of multidimensional poverty measurement, it seems plausible to assume that when individuals are deprived in some dimensions and non-deprived in the remaining ones, the latter can be allowed to play a non-trivial role in the assessment of those individuals' poverty levels. Yet,...

Seasonal food deprivation in Bangladesh, locally known as Monga, sometimes rises to the level of famine during the pre-harvest period of aman rice. An analysis of household income and expenditure survey data shows that income and consumption are lower during Monga than in other seasons, and that...

This paper reports on a randomized survey experiment among 1840 households, designed to compare pen-and-paper interviewing (PAPI) to computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI). We find that PAPI data contain a large number of errors, which can be avoided in CAPI. Error counts are not...

This paper demonstrates that the property of Replication Invariance, generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible variable- and fixed-population axioms. This...

Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper we build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data can allow...