# **3.2. (Parcel-level) Intra-Household Discrepancies in Reporting**

Self-reported data, with potential cross-individual heterogeneity in the interpretation of and responses to the questions on ownership and rights, can result in diverging intra-household reports regarding the same parcel, particularly in settings where documented land ownership is not prevalent.<sup>25</sup> In the absence of a strategy that unquestionably resolves discrepancies, the fallback option in the prior work, as in ours, has been to accept each person’s response as to whether they are an owner of a given asset.

At the same time, a growing number of studies show that variation in reporting within the household could in fact offer greater insights into intra-household dynamics — including important dimensions of women’s health and economic status. Ambler et al. (2017), for example, use the 2011-12 Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey to show that among women, outcomes related to health, employment, and community group participation are positively associated with cases where both they and their spouse agree on joint decision-making across a range of household economic activities, or joint ownership of different household economic farm and non-farm assets, including agricultural land (as well as, to a lesser extent, on whether the wife is attributed decisionmaking or ownership over a particular area, but the husband is not). Annan et al. (2019) also find, using the Demographic and Health Survey data across several Sub-Saharan African countries, that disagreement is substantial over decision-making and that the direction of disagreement matters. For example, the incidence of women attributing more decision-making power to themselves than their husbands is positively associated with a range of health outcomes for those women and their children. Intra-household discrepancies in reporting can therefore have important implications for understanding development outcomes pertaining to women, both within and outside the household.

In our case, the administration of individual interviews using a common roster of agricultural parcels within the IHPS (T5) sample permits the examination of possible discrepancies in spouses’ reported ownership/rights for specific agricultural parcels. In this part of the analysis, we focus on the subsample of IHPS households in which the members of the principal couple were both interviewed, and estimate the following equation at the parcel-level:

> 25 “Even with the documentation, the intrahousehold truth regarding who exerts control over a given asset may not line up with which household members are listed in the records as owners” (Doss et al, 2019: 22) for various reasons including (i) lags in the updating of cadastral records following inter-personal parcel transfers, (ii) temporal variation in intrahousehold control of the parcel in question and (iii) the potential disconnect between _de jure_ legislation (prohibiting gender discrimination in ownership of and rights to land) and local _de facto_ arrangements that may ultimately prevail over state laws and that may result in gender discrimination in a way that exhibits spatial variation in accordance with social norms.

18