higher share of self-employed workers with no income in the administrative data (perhaps due to underreporting to avoid tax obligations).

Methodological survey research on measuring labor outcomes outside of high-income settings have been less common. The quality and regularity of administrative data is one reason, also due in large part to the prevalence of informal and irregularly-paid work in these countries. Recent validation studies have involved smaller, more focused experiments where concurrent household surveys contrast alternative methodological approaches, or modules testing for different approaches are randomized within the same survey. Bardasi et al. (2011), for example, randomized the implementation of a “short” and “detailed” module in the Survey of Household Welfare and Labour in Tanzania, a survey of 1,344 households across seven districts in the country, to examine how employment statistics are affected by (a) the level of detail of questions and (b) self-reporting as opposed to using proxies. Their findings have strong gender implications; proxy response significantly lowers male employment in agriculture, but no effect for women (the proxy effect is mitigated when the spouse is selected as the proxy and when the proxy has some education). A few additional screener questions to identify work mitigates over-reporting of employment among women engaged completely in domestic work, as well as higher average weekly hours conditional on working, especially for men. Dillon et al. (2012) use the same data and experiment to study the effects of proxy reporting and question detail on child labor, and in Serneels et al. (2017) to examine the returns to education. In both of these studies, proxy reporting did not have an effect, but screening questions (i.e. a detailed versus short module) did matter. Finally, the findings around respondent selection can vary by context and experimental design — in a separate experiment from Ethiopia of 1,200 Fairtrade coffee households (Galdo et al., 2019), survey respondents were randomly selected to test, across three different seasons, the effects of proxy reporting on reporting of child labor (children themselves versus the household head or spouse). Proxy reporting was found to significantly underreport work of girls in agricultural settings, relative to children’s own reports.

Our paper builds on this emerging literature by testing whether implementing individual interviews makes a significant difference in the quality of labor reporting, using two concurrent, nationallyrepresentative surveys from Malawi. We also examine how individual and household characteristics vary with survey approach to affect labor reporting.<sup>3</sup> Large-scale studies on labor survey methods from developing countries are also critical, given changes in international definitions of work and employment under the 19<sup>th</sup> International Conference of Labour Statisticians (19<sup>th</sup> ICLS) in 2013 that, for the first time, expand the definition of “work” to include all paid and unpaid activity, but at the same time narrow the definition of employment strictly to

> 3 Other recent developing-country experiments have found that specific characteristics of respondents can matter in accuracy of estimates; recent studies surveying farm households on recall periods and labor reporting, for example, find that recall bias is lower among better-educated respondents (see Gaddis et al, 2019 for a study from Ghana, and Arthi et al., 2018, for findings from Tanzania).

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