variables, total rainfall in the past seven days, and current NDVI value, which correspond to the reasons cited by the interviewers as explanations for not observing the whole circle, are not significant.

Perhaps the most striking finding across the three regressions is the consistent significance of the supervisor effects. In terms of the number of sites visited, the teams led by supervisors 2, 4, and 5 are consistently lower compared to supervisors 1 and 3. This is particularly true for the cases in which they were not accompanied by the survey coordinator. In terms of the percent of the circle observed, the results are harder to interpret. Supervisors 2 and 3 observed smaller proportions of their assigned circles, which would seem contradictory to the findings in the previous two regressions which identify Supervisor 2 as low effort and Supervisor 3 as high effort. It may be difficult in this case to separate what is a lack of effort and what is the inability to completely observe a relatively inaccessible site that other teams would not have extended the extra effort to visit. Finally, the last row of Table 4 indicates that the presence of the survey coordinator was not significant in terms of the area of the circle observed.

Taken together, the three regressions present a picture of what occurred during field implementation and why some areas were not thoroughly worked. Though some evidence on a lack of interviewer effort is confounded by actual obstacles to task completion, such as the distance the team must travel from a paved road, a general lack of significant findings related to flooding and terrain, the two main difficulties cited by supervisors, point toward a low effort interpretation. The substantial findings of supervisor-level effects and the survey coordinator effect further support the low effort hypothesis but also demonstrate that effort level varied across teams. Low field effort can in turn explain why our collected data seems to capture too few livestock, relative to the ERSS household survey, as shown in Table 3.

# **4.4 Tests of ERSS Quality Hypothesis**

In addition to undercoverage by the RGCS, another possible explanation for the discrepant totals in Table 3 is some degree of over-estimation in the numbers produced by the ERSS for Afar. There may be some distortion due to the small sample size, which, as noted in the CSA and World Bank Basic Information Document (2013), is insufficient to support region-specific estimates for the less populous regions, including Afar. The recommendation to group several regions into one “other regions” category for analysis was not possible for this exercise, so the regional results presented here must be interpreted with caution.

There have also been quality issues in data generated by CSA in the past (see Dercon and Hill, 2009 for more detail). The Afar field office is particularly vulnerable to data quality issues as it is a remote region of the country, has fewer staff members, and generally lower levels of skills and training compared to headquarters or other regional field offices. Communication between headquarters and the Afar office is difficult, and communication between the field office and teams is even more complicated due to frequent power outages and unreliable cell phone networks. These issues are exacerbated by long distances and a limited road network which make field supervision challenging. In the review of the ERSS data quality, Afar was one of the regions with the highest incidence of problems, including incorrect listing forms, missing questionnaires, and incomplete information in administered surveys. In particular, the release of the livestock data was delayed for almost a year following the end of fieldwork while data cleaning was completed.

We find support for the hypothesis that the ERSS over reports livestock in the data collected in a survey of the neighboring Somali region. In 2003, as part of the Agricultural Census, USAID contracted a consulting firm based in London and Nairobi to conduct an aerial surveillance estimation of seven of the nine zones in the Somali region that could not be covered due to remoteness and security 13