Session 4: Implications for Data Collection

1. Session 4: Implications for Data Collection Carmen Diana Deere University of Florida Gender Asset Gap Project World Bank Workshop on Gender & Assets, Gender and Development Group, June 14, 2012

2. Issues in Collecting Individual-level Asset Data • Minimum questions required • How many assets? • Who should be interviewed? • If interview two people, how resolve differences?

3. 1. Minimum Questions Required For Gender Asset Gap, only two questions required beyond the normal household assets inventory: • Who are the owners of the asset, with space for multiple owners to capture joint owners • GAG project had three spaces, with codes for “all HH members” or non-HH members who might be joint owners • Whose names are on the ownership document where appropriate • For Gender Wealth Gap, besides above, need at least one measure of valuation for each asset • See Doss et al (2011), Lessons from the Field, available at http://genderassetgap.iimb.ernet.in

4. 2. How Many Assets? Table 1: Share of Gross Physical Household Wealth represented by the four major assets: Principal residence, agricultural land, other real estate and non-farm businesses

5. How Many Assets? Table 2. Composition of Gross Household Wealth (preliminary) Note: Karnataka, India estimateexcludes Bangalore

6. Problems in estimating Gross Household Wealth with the GAG data sets • By design, only solicited information on financial assets in the individual questionnaire to ensure privacy, thus not a household measure • Ecuador & India ended up with truncated samples due to refusals among upper income groups • Many missing values on financial assets • Usual problem of reluctance to disclose savings/cash (distrust) • Problems for comparative analysis: • Insurance instruments different, not valued consistently • Have not yet analyzed pensions

7. Potential information for imputation of financial assets Table 3. Share of Physical Wealth of Principal Couple in Couple-headed Households

8. 3. Who Should Be Interviewed? Bardasi, Beegle, Dillon & Serneels (2010) – Tanzania (n=1344) • Experimental design to test labor force participation questions and respondent selection • Self-reporting provides more accurate information than proxy Fisher, Reimer & Carr (2010) – Malawi (n=130) • Husbands underestimate wives’ income • Disagree on her income in 94% of couple households Cloke (2009) – Nicaragua (n=359) • Gendered reporting bias among couples in who is property titleholder and credit holder • Husbands and wives both more likely to report themselves as the owner rather than their partner Fletschner and Mesbah (2011) – Paraguay (n=210) • Spouses do not fully share information • Wives less likely to have information on financial institutions

9. Differences in Survey Design The three surveys aimed to interview most knowledgeable person(s) regarding assets owned by HH members • Ghana & India: • Principal respondent – completed HH asset inventory & individual questionnaire • Secondary respondent – spouse, if present, or other adult of opposite sex; completed only individual questionnaire and some of asset ownership & valuation questions re-asked during individual interview. • Ecuador: • HH asset inventory completed by the principal couple together whenever possible (dual-headed households) or if the case, the sole male/female head • Each then completed the individual questionnaire separately • If spouse not available for HH inventory, then asset ownership & valuation questions always asked again during individual interview

10. Benefit of Interviewing 2 people separately: More assets? Table 4a. Major Assets added by interviewing a second respondent (% added to Inventory) • Table 4b. Major Assets added by asking the Primary Respondent about • ownership twice (% added to Inventory)

11. Benefit of interviewing 2 people/the couple separately: Allows gender analysis • Men and women may have different perceptions of ownership related to: • Differences in legal knowledge • Different understandings of the bundle of property rights • Gender socialization • Men and women may have different perceptions of the value of their assets related to: • Whether markets exist and degree of integration to markets • Gender differences in mobility and social networks

12. Table 5: Disagreements among Couples over who owns the asset

13. Table 6: Disagreement among couples over valuation of the same asset

14. Table 7a: Estimates of market value of principal residence by husbands and wives Table 7b: Estimates of market value of agricultural parcels by husbands and wives Table 7d: Estimates of market value of non-farm businesses by husbands and wives Table 7c: Estimates of market value of otherreal estate by husbands and wives

15. 4. Main problem of interviewing couple separately: How to reconcile responses? • Ownership disagreements (Ecuador’s rules) • Solved by title (if had document & names agreed with report of one of respondents) • Solved by “combination” (if document didn’t agree with either report, or no document, included all mentioned as joint owners) • Ghana (where few documents) followed latter rule Potential problems: • Ownership question worded differently in individual questionnaire and HH Inventory • Bias towards respondent who answered HH Inventory since title information only asked in this section • Introduces/exacerbates bias towards joint ownership Alternative: • Estimate ownership based on characteristics of individual and joint owners in full sample?

16. Ownership disagreements: Impact of Rules

17. How to reconcile different responses? 2. Disagreements over value of asset (Ecuador’s rules) a) If ownership resolved by title and only 1 owner, took that person’s response; if couple was joint owner, averaged their estimates b) If ownership resolved by “combination rule”, averaged the estimates of the couple Potential problems: • Assumes ‘real owner’ knows value of his/her asset best • Did not remove outliers since planned to average, thus may overestimate ‘true’ value • Would be useful to have administrative data as benchmark

18. 5. Tentative conclusions: • Interviewing both spouses, second person in general, minimally increased total assets captured • In household context probably harder to hide assets than income • Most similar situation to income are financial assets: • If spouse doesn’t know precisely what you earn, easier to hide savings than other assets • For that & other reasons, financial assets most difficult to capture fully even when guaranteeing privacy & confidentiality of responses • Value of interviewing 2 people rests on capturing gender differences in perceptions

19. Thank you! For the country studies & comparative report see: http://genderassetgap.iimb. ernet.in