Food purchased and consumed away from home is a growing share of household expenditure in developing countries. Therefore, measuring the monetary value and estimating the caloric equivalent of these meals are increasingly important for the accurate calculation of a cost-of-basic-needs poverty...

The most common sampling approach for cross-sectional household surveys in the developing world is a stratified two-stage design, where the first stage is usually a sample from a census-based area frame, and the second stage is a random sample of households from each of the areas selected in the...

There is an inherent tension between traditional norms and survey protocols for quantitative data collected in the developing world. Unexpected interactions between the interviewer and respondent can lead to interviewer effects in the data, particularly in the case of subjective or sensitive...

While self-assessments of welfare have become popular for measuring poverty and estimating welfare effects, the methods can be deceptive given systematic heterogeneity in respondents'scales. Little is known about this problem. This study uses specially-designed surveys in three countries,...

In much of the developing world, the demand for high frequency quality household data for poverty monitoring and program design far outstrips the capacity of the statistics bureau to provide such data. In these environments, all available data sources must be leveraged. Most surveys, however, do...

Past research has found that subjective questions about an individuals'economic status do not correspond closely to measures of economic welfare based on household income or consumption. Survey respondents undoubtedly hold diverse ideas about what it means to be"poor"or"rich."Further, this...

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