gender, ethnicity, age, and education in a study of Thailand and Vietnam, and concluded based on interaction effects that matching on respondent and interviewer characteristics improved data quality. Liu & Stainbeck (2013) found inconsistent gender of interviewer effects in a survey on marriage conducted in China. Blaydes & Gillum (2013) examined the impact of a veiled enumerator on questions of religiosity in Egypt, and found Muslim women indicated they were more religious to a veiled enumerator while Christians indicated less. These effects were the largest for younger, poorest and less educated women. Benstead (2010) conducted a similar survey in Morocco that included both male and female respondents and interviewers, finding that respondents gave more socially progressive responses to female interviewers, though less so for veiled female interviewers. She also finds that women respondents were more likely to give socially progressive responses to female interviewers. Flores-Macias & Lawson (2008) find that respondents in Mexico City gave more socially progressive answers when questioned by a woman, but found no differences in the remaining districts of the country. Meng-Li & Yu (2008) looked at the effect education differentials on biotechnology surveys in Taiwan, China, and found no significant first order effects on age, education or interviewer experience, but did find significance on certain second order interactions related to education.

There are other aspects of the interviewer effects literature that are not relevant to this discussion. For example much of the recent literature has focused on the impact of interviewercorrelated non-response on bias and the precision of estimates (see West & Olson, 2010 for a recent example). In the case of the Timor-Leste survey, agreement to participate was secured jointly by the team supervisor and village officials at the cluster level, and therefore it would not be possible to separate the supervisor and geography effects for unit non-response. Unit nonresponse is also less than five percent. For item non-response, all respondents answered all five questions considered here, though some indicated “both” or “neither” of the two choices offered. (See Tables 2 and 3 in the appendix for question-level response rates.) These options were included to decrease the probability that the interviewer would rephrase the question in order to elicit an answer from a potentially confused respondent, and to not overly pressure a respondent to answer a potentially sensitive item. This analysis is not considered in this paper but may be for future work. Other areas of the literature which are not applicable here include learning, as the survey is a cross section (see Bollinger & David, 2005; Duan et al, 2007; and Olson & Peytchev, 2007), and incentive payments as interviewers are paid a flat salary for participation (Kennickell, 2004; Rosen et al, 2010).

# **3. Data**

In 2007 the Timor-Leste Survey of Living Standards (TLSLS2) collected information on household demographics, consumption based welfare measures, and a range of other socioeconomic characteristics. The following year, the World Bank conducted an extension survey (TLSLS-2X) to collect additional information on agriculture, shocks and vulnerability, 4