Randomization to different interview modes was adopted to guide an eventual transition to recall as a cheaper way of collecting IHSES data on food.<sup>9</sup> As non-food expenditures are already measured using different recall periods depending on the frequency of purchase, the experiment was limited to food measurements. Recall groups were defined and matched to their counterparts in the diary using the COICOP classification, yielding the quantities _Y_<sup>_d_</sup> and _Y_<sup>_r_</sup> defined above. Both quantities include household estimations of the market value of food items consumed that are not acquired from the market such as self-produced items and gifts. In practice, however, market purchases account for almost all entries in our case study. We used the square root of family size to equivalize survey measurements in our analysis. Acquisitions and valuations of recalled consumption, in Iraqi dinars, were transformed to US dollars throughout.

There are no incentives for households to report specific consumption levels, for instance, to meet thresholds for social programs. The most important social safety net, the Public Distribution System (PDS), is a universal in-kind food subsidy, and other much smaller public transfers were not meanstargeted at the time of the survey.<sup>10</sup> A separate IHSES module collected information about ration items received, consumed, bartered, sold or given away by the household during the last 30 days. The diary recorded market transactions to purchase ration items over and above the monthly allocation, but these transactions in our data are rare and small in magnitude. Because our focus is on comparing diary entries with recalled consumption, the consumption of rationed products is excluded from our analysis.

# **3.3 Covariate Balance and Raw Distributions**

Table 1 documents the demographic balance for households assigned to recall modules. This randomly selected group of roughly 8,000 households constitutes our “treatment” sample, while all remaining households form the “baseline” sample. This table shows treatment-control differences from regressions that control for strata (EAs) used in the randomization design. All variables are well balanced between groups, as can be seen from the small and nonsignificant coefficient estimates in the two panels.

Randomization to the recall module did not affect the reporting of diary entries, as shown in Table 2. Respondents might adjust their diary to reconcile aggregates with those in the recall module, as in bounded interviews (see Neter and Waksberg, 1964), but the results in column 2 rule out this possibility. Specifically, Panel A reports treatment-control differences in cumulative distributions of diary acquisitions _Y_<sup>_d_</sup> at selected percentiles, as well as differences in averages. Treatment-control differences in the dispersion of _Y_<sup>_d_</sup> are reported in Panel B. Results in column 2 imply that diaries collected in treatment and baseline samples yielded statistically indistinguishable distributions of household acquisitions.

Recall data yielded higher consumption figures than diary acquisition. This can be seen from column 3 in Panel A of Table 2, which presents coefficients from the same regressions in column 2 but using

> of the 17 most important food items considered in the Beegle et al. (2012) Tanzania experiment.

> 9As noted in the sampling and fieldwork documentation, the recall module “ _should be administered in the first visit to the household, before the recording of food consumption by diaries. Asking these questions afterwards (when both the respondent and the interviewer will know the diary records) would defeat the purpose of this module, which is to compare the results obtained from the two instruments, to assess the possibility of applying in future surveys the recall method instead of diaries_ ”.

> 10The PDS includes 13 rationed products, of which four, whole wheat flour, rice, vegetable oil/cooking oil and sugar represent almost 98% of total rationed expenditures. Because they are heavily subsidized, ration expenditures account for only 6% of average household spending.

10