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Anchoring Bias in Recall Data
Understanding the magnitude and source of measurement biases in self-reported data is critical to effective economic policy research. This paper examines the role of anchoring bias in self-reports of objective and subjective outcomes under recall. The research exploits a unique panel survey data set collected over a three-year period from four countries in Central America. It assesses whether respondents use their reported value of specific measures from the most recent survey period as a cognitive heuristic when recalling the value from a previous period, while controlling for the value they reported earlier. We find strong evidence of sizable anchoring bias in self-reported retrospective indicators for both objective measures (household and per capita income, wages, and hours spent on the household’s main activity) and subjective measures (reports of happiness, health, stress, and well-being). In general, we also observe a larger bias in response to negative changes for objective indicators and a larger bias in response to positive changes for subjective indicators.
Measuring postharvest losses at the farm level in Malawi
Reducing food loss and waste are important policy objectives prominently featured in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. To optimally design interventions targeted at reducing losses, it is important to know where losses are concentrated between the farm and fork. This paper measures farmlevel postharvest losses for three main crops—maize, soy, and groundnuts—among 1,200 households in Malawi. Farmers answered a detailed questionnaire designed to learn about losses during harvest and transport, processing, and storage and which measures both total losses and reductions in crop quality. The findings indicate that fewer than half of households report suffering losses condit...
Employment risk and job-seeker performance
This paper examines the relationship between employment risk and job-seeker performance. To induce exogenous variation in employment risk, the outside options for job seekers undergoing a real recruitment process were randomized by assigning them a 0, 1, 5, 50, 75, or 100 percent chance of real alternative employment of the same duration and wage as the jobs for which they were applying. The findings show that job-seeker performance is highest and effort is lowest among those assigned the lowest employment risk (a guaranteed alternative job), and performance is lowest and effort highest among those facing the highest employment risk (those without any job guarantee). Moreover, a nonlinear relationship exists between employment risk and performance.
Can survey design reduce anchoring bias in recall data? Evidence from Malawi
Recall biases in retrospective survey data are widely considered to be pervasive and have important implications for effective agricultural research. In this paper, we leverage the survey design literature and test three strategies to attenuate mental anchoring in retrospective data collection: question order effects, retrieval cues, and aggregate (community) anchoring. We embed a survey design experiment in a longitudinal survey of smallholder farmers in Malawi and focus on anchoring bias in maize production and happiness exploiting differences between recalled and concurrent responses. We find that asking for retrospective data before concurrent data reduces recall bias by approximately 34% for maize production, a meaningful improvement with no increase in survey data collection costs. Retrieval cues are less successful in reducing the bias for maize reports and involve more data collection time, while community anchors can exacerbate the bias. Reversing the order of questions and retrieval cues do not help to ease the bias for happiness reports.
Gender research in the CGIAR research program on policies, institutions, and markets in 2018 and 2019
This report analyses PIM’s 391 peer-reviewed 2018 and 20191 publications. We highlight key gender findings and discuss the challenges faced by researchers in doing gender analysis, with a view to documenting lessons learned and improving practices. It is hoped that the gaps and strengths identified in this report will be useful inputs for future research under PIM and One CGIAR.
Handbook of Economic Expectations
Handbook of Economic Expectations discusses the state-of-the-art in the collection, study and use of expectations data in economics, including the modelling of expectations formation and updating, as well as open questions and directions for future research. The book spans a broad range of fields, approaches and applications using data on subjective expectations that allows us to make progress on fundamental questions around the formation and updating of expectations by economic agents and their information sets. The information included will help us study heterogeneity and potential biases in expectations and analyze impacts on behavior and decision-making under uncertainty. - Combines information about the creation of economic expectations and their theories, applications and likely futures - Provides a comprehensive summary of economics expectations literature - Explores empirical and theoretical dimensions of expectations and their relevance to a wide array of subfields in economics
African Successes, Volume III
Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series looks at recent improvements in living standards and other measures of development in many African countries with an eye toward identifying what shaped them and the extent to which lessons learned are transferable and can guide policy in other nations and at the international level. The third volume in the series, African Successes: Modernization and Development looks at the rise in private production in spite of difficult institutional and physical environments. The volume emphasizes the ways that technologies, including mobile phones, have made growth in some areas especially dynamic.
Making pulses affordable again
Rising prices and declining consumption of pulses cause concern in terms of both nutrition and food inflation in India. This paper outlines policy strategies to increase the availability of pulses at affordable prices in India and also points out limitations of some of the most common recommendations for achieving these objectives. There seems to be no option but to increase domestic production of pulses in India. The global supply of pulses is limited compared with India’s needs, and sizable imports by India are bound to increase world prices. Domestic production of pulses in India is most likely piecewise inelastic, meaning that small price increases do not translate into a significant s...
