of a broader effort to operationalize the international best practices in collecting individualdisaggregated survey data on asset ownership and work and employment. The individual interviews were capped at four per household and it was ensured that the head of household and his/her spouse (if one exists) were among the interviewed individuals.<sup>7</sup> Within-household interviews were always administered in private and were attempted to be administered simultaneously and with a gender match-up between the enumerator and respondent. Appendix I includes the protocol for administering the IHPS individual questionnaire.<sup>8</sup> In comparing the two survey approaches, our prior is that self-reporting with one-on-one interviews would more accurately reflect labor outcomes among respondents. Our analysis focuses on individuals aged 18-64, for whom the information was elicited during the IHS4-IHPS overlapping fieldwork period of April 2016-January 2017.<sup>9</sup> To compare the IHS4 to the IHPS, we pool the data on 17,433 IHS4 respondents together with 4,377 IHPS respondents that self-reported and were interviewed in private. The combined sample includes 21,810 observations. The IHS4 sample is a mix of self-reporting individuals as well as individuals for whom the information was provided through a proxy. The latter set constitutes 39.4 percent of the IHS4 sample.<sup>10</sup> We do not discard any IHS4 observations on the basis of self- versus proxy reporting since the official statistics would be based on the totality of these survey data, irrespective of the deviations from the international best practices.

Conversely, there are 969 IHPS respondents that were eligible but were unavailable for the individual interview, constituting a non-response rate of 16.8 percent (of a total of 5,776). To use the IHPS dataset in a way that can gauge the accuracy of the IHS4 data, we focus only on the IHPS individuals that have been subject to individual interviews and correct for non-response. To do the latter, we calculate weights by first running a logistic regression of individual response status among the 5,776 adults eligible for individual interviews. The results from the logistic regression are presented in the Appendix Table A1.<sup>11</sup> Subsequently, we (1) take the inverse of the predicted

> 7 This was an upper limit that only applied to one percent of the sampled household population that had more than four adults. If a sampled household had more than four adult household members, following the preference given to the head of the household, and his/her spouse if applicable, the remaining interview targets (2 or 3 depending on the presence of a spouse) were selected at random from the remaining pool of adult household members.

> 8 For more information on the organization and implementation of the individual-disaggregated data collection as part of the IHPS, please consult the survey’s basic information document, which can be accessed here: <u>https://microdata.worldbank.org/index.php/catalog/2939/download/47216.</u>

> 9 In view of seasonality of work and employment activities in Malawi, the sample is limited to the overlapping fieldwork months to ensuring temporal comparability of the individual-level data solicited in both surveys. 10 Comparing self-reporters versus individuals reported by proxy in the IHS4, we find that self-reporters tend to be significantly older and less educated, more likely to be female, married, to be the household head or spouse, and to live in smaller, poorer households with a higher dependency ratio than respondents who did not report for themselves (results available upon request). These differences are also in line with other studies that compare self-respondents and respondents-by-proxy (Bardasi et al., 2011; Serneels et al., 2017).

> 11 Van den Broeck and Kilic (2019) use a similar approach to correct for attrition bias in panel data samples, in a study of labor market dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa. Our right-hand-side predictors of “response” include (i) fixed effects for districts, interview months and enumerators, (ii) individual covariates, including age; a dichotomous variable

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