Since the weekly phone arm was primarily intended as a proof of concept, the focus of this paper is the comparison of the weekly visit group and the recall group – in other words, we do _not_ include any analysis of the data from the weekly phone group.

While the overall design of this study is very similar to Arthi et al (2018), there is one significant difference: This study fielded a baseline survey to _all_ households, including recall households, which allowed us to collect a baseline listing of plots and household workers. This listing of plots and household workers plays a crucial role, because all data on farm labor were collected at the person-plot level. However, respondents could add plots and household workers that were not listed at baseline during subsequent visits – that is during visits 1 to 24 (weekly visits, endline) in the weekly visit group, and during the endline in the recall group. This design variation follows from the results in Arthi et al (2018), who document that underreporting of plots and household workers in the recall group counteracts overestimation of farm labor per person per plot. Having access to a baseline survey for all households allows us to explore in greater detail bias in listings of plots and household workers, but it may also explain some of the difference in results between this study and Arthi et al (2018). We will revert to this issue in section 4.5, where we compare the results obtained for Ghana and Tanzania.

Our field work design randomized households within villages. We are confident that intra-cluster contamination among households is minimal given that villages tend to be large and the sampled households are rather dispersed. The within-village randomization is aimed at balancing micro-agroecological characteristics that may affect the allocation of household labor and are difficult to be captured in the available survey and satellite data.

Although the initial sample was 240 households per experiment arm, we had some attrition at different stages. In the weekly visit group, 20 households dropped out of which 9 were replaced with a final sample of 229 households. In the recall group, 7 households dropped out leaving a final sample of 233 households. In all subsequent analysis, households that were not interviewed at the endline are excluded, as well as households in the weekly visit arm that dropped out before week 16 (even if they re-appeared at endline).

**Table 1** summarizes household and plot characteristics across the weekly visit and recall arms, drawing on the baseline survey. For most of the traits presented in this table, households are well balanced across survey arms, but there are some exceptions. In the weekly visit group, the average household consists of 5.8 members, of whom 1.6 are children younger than 10 years old, and cultivates 2.6 plots. The average plot is located within 54 minutes’ walk from the households’ residence. Of all individuals aged 10 and older, 55 percent worked on one or more household plots between the start of land preparations and the baseline survey. However, households in the recall group are significantly smaller, have fewer cultivated plots and are further away from their plots, compared to households in the weekly visit group. Because of these baseline differences, our empirical analysis controls for household size, number of plots, and the average distance between the plots and the residence at baseline. Cropping patterns are very similar across arms, with maize being the most important crop in both arms, followed by yam and groundnuts.

8