He Said/She Said: Testing Respondent Effects in Household Income Reporting

Obtaining reliable data on household and respondent income and understanding the quality of this data is of great importance to researchers and policy makers. Several papers have found evidence that household income is often misreported. However, the causes and consequences of intra-household reporting discrepancies remain poorly understood. Commonly, the most knowledgeable household member, often the household head, is interviewed in household surveys. Surveying only one household member could potentially lead to incomplete or erroneous information on the households’ aggregate income for several reasons. Household members could be oblivious of all income-generating activities of their spouses, for example because spouses intentionally hide income from one another. Incomplete pooling of information within the household could also result in difficulties to accurately report on other’s income, even if a household member is aware of all sources of income. These concerns can be overrun by assessing multiple household members separately. However, this comes at a logistical and monetary cost. This survey experiment aims to shed light on the discrepancies in intra-household reporting on aggregate income.