The largest portion of each workday is devoted to household agriculture. Figure 1 gives an overview of the hours per day across activities as reported in the weekly visits. Figure 1a averages across all people ages 10 or above for all days, and figure 1b excludes weekends and days the person was ill. Roughly a third of the total of 3.6 to 4.2 working hours, respectively, are devoted to agricultural activities. These data obscure important distributional differences, to which we return in later sections. Finally, figure 1c shows the allocation of time on days when at least some household farm activity was reported. On average, 5.8 hours were spent across all activities, of which 78 percent was spent on household farming. The remainder of the time was made up largely of collecting water, tending to livestock, and attending school.

# **4. RESULTS**

## _4.1. Main results_

### **Overreporting hours on the farm**

To examine the implications of survey design on the reporting of household farm labor, we start from the lowest unit: the number of hours each household member spent on each household plot over the course of the entire season (henceforth, person-plot hours).<sup>14</sup> Throughout the analysis presented here and unless otherwise specified, plots refer to plots on which any household member was reported to have worked at any point during the season. This measure of plots depends on the actual incidence of labor (rather than on the stated use of the plots) and so does not include plots held fallow, rented out, and so on, for which no household labor was reported. The analysis is restricted to household members ages 10 or older who reported they worked on any household plot during the season (a “person”).<sup>15</sup> By this definition, then, any specific person-plot hours could total zero.

Panel A of table 3 reports the results at the person-plot level. Hours per day, exaggerated by roughly 11 percent, are more accurately reported in recall than are other aspects of time use such as hours, days, or weeks.<sup>16</sup> By contrast, total weeks in recall are higher than in weekly visits by 128 percent, and total days are higher by 179–223 percent. The cumulative effect of the exaggerated days and weeks in the recall modules results in a striking divergence in the time spent 14 The recall NPS households were asked to report the number of days spent performing each of four agricultural activities. They did not provide the specific days on which these activities occurred; so, we do not know if reporting one day in weeding and one day in planting was, in fact, two separate days of work, or a single day in which both of these two activities were performed. To compute total time in hours for the recall NPS group, we chose to compute an upper bound for the number of days by assuming that each activity-day reported was sequential or mutually exclusive, that is, that people did not perform more than one activity on the same day. This choice is supported by the similarity between this measure and the days data reported by recall ALT households. It is also supported by the activity patterns of the weekly surveyed households, where we find evidence that agricultural workers overwhelmingly tend to pursue one agricultural activity in a given workday. The typical length of an agricultural workday (roughly four or five hours) as reported across the other three arms of the study is similar to the mean hours per activity in the recall NPS survey, further supporting this interpretation.

> 15 Of the 3,707 individuals ages 10 and older in the 854 households in our study, 821 reported no agricultural work and are excluded from the analysis.

> 16 As we show in Section 4.2, this is consistent with the fact that hours worked per day are more regular and less variable relative to weeks and days per week worked.

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