Consumption expenditure has long been the preferred measure of household living standards. However, accurate measurement is a challenge and household expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions, including the level of reporting, the length of the reference period, and the degree of...

This paper presents unique evidence that orphanhood matters in the long run for health and education outcomes, in a region of Northwestern Tanzania. The paper studies a sample of 718 non-orphaned children surveyed in 1991-94, who were traced and re-interviewed as adults in 2004. A large...

The authors use a 13-year panel of individuals in Tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long-run consumption growth of surviving household members. Using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004, they examine consumption growth, controlling for a set...

A good understanding of the constraints on agricultural growth in Africa relies on the accurate measurement of smallholder labor. Yet, serious weaknesses in these statistics persist. The extent of bias in smallholder labor data is examined by conducting a randomized survey experiment among...

Consumption expenditure has long been the preferred measure of household living standards. However, accurate measurement is a challenge and household expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions, including the level of reporting, the length of the reference period, and the degree of...

Surveys of consumption expenditure vary widely across many dimensions, including the level of reporting, the length of the reference period, and the degree of commodity detail. These variations occur both across countries and also over time within countries, with little current understanding of...

There is widespread interest in the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has advocated for...

This paper uses data from eight different consumption questionnaires randomly assigned to 4,000 households in Tanzania to obtain evidence on the nature of measurement errors in estimates of household consumption. While there are no validation data, the design of one questionnaire and the...

There is widespread interest in estimating the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has...

This paper uses a 13-year panel of individuals in Tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long-run consumption growth of surviving household members. Using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004, we examine consumption growth, controlling for a set of...