Measuring consumption over the phone: Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia

Rural household vulnerability and COVID-19: Evidence from India

“…The regression results displayed in Table 5 suggest that agricultural households who do not own the land of their houses are those who are substantially more vulnerable during the pandemic [column (1)], because they are evidently poorer and more suspetible to aggregate shock. This finding stresses the importance of owning fixed assets to insure against vulnerability to poverty, as suggested by Carter and Barrett [ 36 ]. It also underscores that those agricultural households without ownership of their houses should be prioritized when the government and non-profit organizations design and implement social welfare programs in rural India.…”

“…This observation is consistent with Magrini et al [ 13 ], justifying the adoption of Ligon and Schechter’s [ 31 ] approach to measure vulnerability due to the measurement error of the survey data. It also resonates with the Abate et al’s [ 36 ] finding that the quality of expenditure or income reported in high-frequency phone surveys differs from in-person interviews, the best practice typically deployed by researchers during normal periods.…”

“…Second, statistically, the vulnerability estimates derived from Ligon and Schechter [ 31 ]’s approach are more valid in the presence of a measurement error, despite Chaudhuri et al’s [ 30 ] measure of vulnerability being the best practice in a stationary environment without measurement error [ 35 ]. This difference is particularly relevant to this study’s context because the quality of the expenditure and income measures from phone surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic departs from the “best practice” approach applied to in-person surveys during the pre-pandemic period [ 36 ]. Admittedly, in the context of the pandemic, carrying out large-scale in-person interviews may not be feasible due to severe concerns related to health.…”

“…Thus, the second and third bracket terms assess household i ’s vulnerability to covariate risk (e.g., COVID-driven national and regional lockdown) and idiosyncratic risk (e.g., illness), respectively. In practice, however, the measurement of household expenditure with error, especially in phone surveys, is not uncommon [ 36 ]. We, thus, further decompose the measure of idiosyncratic risk into the risk associated with observable household characteristics x it and risk due to changes in unobserved factors and to measurement errors in expenditures.…”

Material and nonmaterial impacts of theCOVID‐19 pandemic: Evidence from a low‐income country

“…We acknowledge that a recall period of 30 days is relatively long and might make it difficult for respondents to remember consumption accurately. Furthermore, there is some evidence that survey fatigue in phone conversations can lead to underreporting of consumption items as compared to face-to-face surveys (Abate et al, 2023). On the other hand, "telescoping" 7 -and, in consequence, overreporting consumption-could also be an issue (Abate et al, 2022).…”