occurrence does not necessarily indicate effectiveness since, for example, a legal system with high level of effectiveness works through its shadow rather than through explicit use of the courts.<sup>39</sup> Final decisions on the form of the question reflected information gained in the field at various stages of survey implementation, during translations and scripting, while training local surveyors, and from a 'cognitive audit' of the question. These stages are described in detail in Appendix A.3, and Appendix A.6 reports the (negligible) rates of "Don't Know" responses.<sup>40</sup> We have spent longer than is usual in addressing issues of question wording, since the relevance and validity of the data obtained from our question is central in this paper. Nevertheless, the problems we faced, and trade-offs we encountered are typical of any study that aims to collect data that is not recorded in the accounts of firms. To put the process of question design into context, it is worth remembering that in the seminal paper in the current line of inquiry, Macaulay (1963) was forced to remark that "...to a great extent, existing knowledge has been inadequate to permit more rigorous procedures—as yet one cannot formulate many precise questions to be asked a systematically selected sample...Much time has been spent fishing for relevant questions..." Despite the years since the publication of Macaulay's paper and the subsequent recognition that it had raised fundamental issues, researchers still face a notable challenge in constructing universally applicable questions that address the problems of data collection that he so clearly articulated. In this paper, we have endeavored to implement a question that covers a comprehensive set of agents

> 39 It is conceivable that respondents could confuse the term 'effective' with other terms we avoided, such as importance, usefulness, or frequency of use or occurrence. However, as noted below, various stages of survey implementation included a 'cognitive audit' of our survey question, which is described in more detail in Appendix A.3. Interviewees did interpret the term 'effective' as referring to a combination of both the extent of reliance and productiveness of the enforcement agent: the lowest ranking on the scale would be chosen if either the enforcement agent was not relied on, including due to lack of knowledge about that possibility for enforcement, or if it had been relied upon and it was ineffective.

> 40 Low rates of "don't know" responses may be suggestive of good comprehension of questions by respondents (Krosnick 1991). The questions used in this paper had frequencies of don't knows that were comparable to those questions that had proven satisfactory by their staying power through many cycles of the WBES surveys. Krosnick and Presser (2010) note that frequent selection of a middle point on a scale (our 'moderately') is evidence of satisficing behavior on the part of respondents. There is no evidence in our data that that the mid-point is used frequently. Given the negligible rates of "don't know" responses, we omit from our analysis any observation that has at least one "don't know" as a response to any of the set of six sub-questions.

20