Category: Uncategorized

(Over the last few years, I have explained to a number of colleagues and graduate students that I was not interested in doing development anymore. I am writing this post to avoid having the same conversation over and over, probably against all hope since no one reads anything anymore anyway. Other mid- to late-career folks might find something useful in this post, having perhaps witnessed the same changes I have over the last 25 years.)

“The mediocre teacher tells; the good teacher explains; the superior teacher demonstrates; the great teacher inspires,” said William Arthur Ward.

I had promised myself I would deactivate my Twitter X profile after the election to take a break from frantically cycling through the same four or five political pundits’ accounts since early summer. The date to re-activate my account (to avoid it being deleted) came and went without me wanting to do so. And just like that, there went nearly 20,000 followers accrued over the span of 14 years.

My paper with Wahed Rahman and Jeff Bloem titled “Survey Ordering and the Measurement of Welfare” has been accepted and is now forthcoming at the Journal of the Economic Science Association.

Here is the accepted version, and here is the abstract:

Economic policy and research rely on the accurate measurement of welfare. In nearly all instances, measuring welfare requires collecting data via long household surveys. If survey response patterns change over the course of a survey to introduce measurement error, this measurement error can be either classical (i.e., changing distributions, leading to noise) or non-classical (i.e., changing expectations, leading to bias). We embed an experiment in a survey by randomly assigning a questionnaire with either the assets module near the beginning of the survey or the assets module at the end of the survey, delaying enumeration of assets by about 60 minutes. We find no evidence in the full sample that survey ordering introduces differential response patterns, either in the number of reported assets or the reported value of those assets. In exploratory analysis of heterogeneity, we find evidence of non-classical measurement error due to survey ordering within sub-samples of respondents who (i) are from larger households or (ii) have low levels of education. Our experimental design can be generalized to serve as an ex post test of data quality with respect to questionnaire length.