The Distribution of Effort: Physical Activity, Gender Roles, and Bargaining Power in an Agrarian Setting

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Positioning household surveys for the next decade

“…Research has demonstrated the extent and econometric implications of non-classical measurement errors in self-reported survey data on a range of topics, while also documenting the accuracy, feasibility, and cost implications of adopting direct measurement tools, such as GPS technology for plot area measurement and outline capture [79][80][81][82], crop cutting for crop yield estimation [83][84][85][86], high-frequency phone survey data collection for measuring household agricultural labor inputs [87,88], DNA fingerprinting for crop variety identification [89,90], physical activity trackers (i.e. accelerometers) for informing the measurement and analysis of labor productivity, effort, and poverty [91][92][93][94], smartphone applications for time use measurement, recording social interactions between respondents and interviewers, or real-time travel patterns [95][96][97][98][99], lowcost testing kits for the rapid measurement of water quality [100], and "web scraping" for automating the collection of prices for selected internet retailers, as opposed to relying exclusively on survey operations for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) [101].…”