food security but choose to under-report consumption in order to signal their potential eligibility and increase their chances of being offered PWP or other benefits in the future. We argue that two features of our research design make it less likely in this study than in many other randomized controlled trials that rely on similar data. First, data collection and program implementation are conducted by different institutions. The National Statistics Office is responsible for survey work, and the Local Development Fund with assistance from Innovations for Poverty Action manages PWP activities and payments. Respondents do not report their food consumption or other outcomes to people who are employed by or connected to the administration of the public works program. Second, households in our study<sup>17</sup> were included in the IHS3, a nationally-representative survey that is not connected to the provision of any public or private benefits. These households had been administered the same survey instrument by the same institution (NSO) before the study began, and had not received any benefits that depended on their answers. These features distinguish our evaluation from RCTs that rely on data collected by employees of the same organization that administers the intervention, and from evaluations of subjects who have no reason _not_ to infer that surveys are collected for the purpose of allocating benefits.

We are not able to assess the reliability of our various outcome measures in order to determine whether perceived or self-reported food security may have fallen absent a change in objective consumption. While the eight different measures of nutrition we examine are all related to food security, they measure different aspects of the concept. Therefore, we cannot use the correlations between items in the IHS3 and subsequent survey rounds as an indication of item reliability, because the program itself may have affected some measures of food security differently than others. If strategic misreporting is a concern, it will not be identified by comparing so-called “subjective” measures to “objective” measures (such as expenditure).

While we cannot directly rule out strategic misreporting, we think it less likely to influence results in our evaluation than in many other studies relying on self-reported data. The remainder of our discussion focuses on explanations for real negative spillovers. We cannot rule out that PWP changed the behavior of untreated households in some way that worsened food security. Such a mechanism would have to take a very specific form to explain both the result and be consistent with the behaviors we observe. One possibility is as follows: PWP eligibility causes a change in the behavior of treated households that is not captured by our survey (either because it falls outside the recall period, or because it is too small to be measured precisely). Untreated households respond to the behavior or consequences of

> 17Because of the error in NSO’s original village listing, about 20 percent of villages we study were not part of the IHS3. As discussed previously, we do not observe differences in the impact of PWP across IHS3 and non-IHS3 villages.

27