There is wide variation in how consumption is measured in household surveys, both across countries and over time. This variation may confound welfare comparisons in part because these alternative survey designs produce consumption estimates differentially influenced by contrasting types of...

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 review covers a nascent literature that experiments with survey design to measure whether the way in which we collect socio-economic data in developing countries influences the data and affects the results of subsequent analyses. We start by showing that survey methods matter and the size...

The nutrition transition in developing countries has increased interest in moving the measurement and analysis of nutritional choice beyond calories to a more complete understanding of macro- and micronutrient consumption. To help move the literature on data collection forward we randomly...

While city migrants see their welfare increase much more than those moving to towns, many more rural-urban migrants end up in towns. This phenomenon, documented in detail in Kagera, Tanzania, begs the question why migrants move to seemingly suboptimal destinations. Using an 18-year panel of...

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within a unique data set of 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of misperception of income among all pairs of households belonging to the same network. We show that...

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within a unique data set of 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of misperception of income among all pairs of households belonging to the same network. We show that...

In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration...

Despite average per-capita consumption of roughly $1 per day, many Tanzanian households do not take advantage of bulk discounts for staple goods. Using transaction diaries covering nearly 57,000 purchases by 1,499 households over two weeks, we find that through bulk purchasing the average...

There is rising concern that the ongoing wave of urbanization will have profound effects on eating patterns and increase the risk of nutrition-related non-communicable diseases. Yet, our understanding of urbanization as a driver of food consumption remains limited and primarily based upon...