Rural Labor and Long Recall Loss

Surveys frequently rely on annual recall to capture individuals’ labor activities over the preceding year. This paper uses a panel of rural households in Malawi for a survey experiment to test the effect of a long, annual recall window on reported labor supply relative to a set of quarterly interviews. The paper documents large losses in reported labor participation using the long recall window with reductions of over 20 percent of reported activities and months worked and a 2.5 times greater incidence of reported unemployment relative to the shorter window. These losses are greater for activities further in the past and especially for individuals whose labor supply is reported by other family members, reaching up to 50 percent for some outcomes. The profile of households’ primary respondents, predominantly male and older, and differential effects by age further suggest that long recall may cause meaningful biases in the resulting data for women and younger household members.