Measuring Employment: Experimental Evidence from Urban Ghana

Rachel Heath, Ghazala Mansuri, Bob Rijkers, William Hutchins Seitz and Dhiraj Sharma

No 9263, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Using a randomized survey experiment in urban Ghana, this paper demonstrates that the length of the reference period and the interview modality (in person or over the phone) affect how people respond in labor surveys, with impacts varying markedly by job type. Survey participants report significantly more self-employment spells when the reference period is shorter than the traditional one week, with the impacts concentrated among those in home-based and mobile self-employment. In contrast, there is no impact of the reference period on the incidence of wage employment. The wage employed report working fewer days and hours when confronted with a shorter reference period. Finally, interviews conducted on the phone yield lower estimates of employment, hours worked, and days worked among the self-employed who are working from home or a mobile location as compared with in-person interviews.

Keywords: Rural Labor Markets; Employment and Unemployment; Labor Markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/33591159 ... from-Urban-Ghana.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:wbk:wbrwps:9263

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().