concepts like “joint” ownership may not be well understood (Jacobs and Kes, 2015). Using plotlevel data from Ethiopia and Malawi, Kang et al. (2020) also find that joint ownership may not necessarily translate into actual decision-making roles, with men often continuing to have soledecision making on planting on jointly-owned plots.<sup>7</sup> Other subjective issues arise aside from overall ownership — Doss et. al (2018), for example, find using nationally representative data from Ghana and Ecuador and for the state of Karnataka, India, that across all three samples, the distribution of monetary values of dwellings reported by women tends to be more narrowly clustered around the middle of the distribution, as compared to men, potentially affecting calculations of wealth inequality depending on the share of men and women in the survey sample.

In 2016, the Malawi National Statistical Office concurrently implemented (i) the Fourth Integrated Household Survey 2016/17 (IHS4) - a cross-sectional, nationally-representative survey of 12,480 households, and (ii) the Integrated Household Panel Survey 2016 (IHPS) - a longitudinal survey of 2,508 households that have been followed since 2010. The IHPS was the first nationallyrepresentative multi-topic household survey attempting to operationalize the aforementioned UN Guidelines and to interview each adult household member in private regarding their personal ownership of and rights to selected physical and financial assets. The individual interviews were attempted to be conducted simultaneously in each household and with a gender match between the enumerators and the respondents. On dwelling (inclusive of the residential plot) and agricultural land, the IHPS administered adapted versions of the MEXA questionnaire modules, inquiring directly regarding the respondents’ personal — exclusive as well as joint — ownership of and rights. In contrast, the IHS4 followed the traditional (i.e. business-as-usual) approach of interviewing the most knowledgeable household member(s) to provide information on household members’ ownership of and rights to the same set of assets.

The parallel implementation of the IHPS and the IHS4 offers an opportunity to assess the effects of conducting best-practice individual-level interviews vis-à-vis the business-as-usual approach on the measurement of ownership of and rights to agricultural land among adult household members. Overall, our findings support privately interviewing multiple household members. In the IHS4, 67 percent of women live in male-headed households, and 70 percent in the IHPS, reinforcing the importance of looking within households to better understand gender asset gaps.<sup>8</sup> Malawi is a unique context, where women’s land ownership often exceeds men’s ownership, due to strong matrilineal traditions where family land is passed through the female line. Simple comparisons reveal that women’s land ownership is, on the whole, higher than men’s in both the IHS4 and IHPS, although headship does matter — exclusive reported ownership and rights among non-headed women are significantly lower than for men in the IHS4, while these gaps close in the IHPS.

> 7 The plot-level data used by Kang et al. (2020) stem from the national surveys implemented in Ethiopia and Malawi, with support from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMSISA), including the Malawi Fourth Integrated Household Survey (IHS4), which is in part the subject of our paper. 8 For men, this share was about 89 percent across both the IHS4 and the IHPS.

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