Assessing Biases in Call-detail records for Development Estimates

Gabriel Pestre, Emmanuel Letouze and Emilio Zagheni

Working Paper from Agence française de développement

Abstract: This article contributes to improving our understanding of biases in estimates of demographic indicators, in the developing world, based on Call Detail Records (CDRs). CDRs represent an important and largely untapped source of data for the developing world. However, they are not representative of the underlying population. We combine CDRs and census data for Senegal in 2013 to evaluate biases related to estimates of population density. We show that: (i) there are systematic relationships between cell-phone use and socio-economic and geographic characteristics that can be leveraged to improve estimates of population density; (ii) when no ‘ground truth’ data is available, a difference-in-difference approach can be used to reduce bias and infer relative changes over time in population size at the subnational level; (iii) indicators of development, including urbanization and internal, circular, and temporary migration, can be monitored by integrating census data and CDRs. The paper is intended to offer a methodological contribution and examples of applications related to combining new and traditional data sources to improve our ability to monitor development indicators over time and space.

JEL-codes: Q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22
Date: 2017-11-30
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Research Papers

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.afd.fr/sites/afd/files/imported-files/32-papiers-recherche.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:avg:wpaper:en7749

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Agence française de développement Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AFD ().