世界银行-缩小差距：筛选问题和自我报告在衡量妇女和青年就业和工作中的作用（英）-2024.5-67页_1mb

报告摘要

Summary: Closing the Gaps in Measuring Women's and Youths' Employment and Work

Objective

This paper examines how alternative survey methods can address underreporting of labor market outcomes for women and youth, thereby improving the measurement of gender and age gaps. The study uses a survey experiment in El Salvador comparing a traditional household survey with a list of activities (LOA) module and enforced self-reporting (ESR) method.

Methodology

A survey experiment was conducted with 1,008 households and 2,480 working-age individuals. Three groups were randomly assigned:

Control (C): Traditional survey with proxy responses allowed.
LOA Group: Includes the LOA module before the labor module, with proxy responses permitted.
ESR Group: Enforces self-reporting for eligible respondents without the LOA module.

The primary outcomes are employment and work rates. Data collection involved focus groups to define activities as work and a randomized controlled design to isolate method effects.

Key Findings

LOA Module: Significantly increases reported employment (4.0 pp) and work (4.3 pp) on average. It reduces the gender work gap by 8.2 pp, with women showing a 6.8 pp increase in employment and 8.1 pp in work compared to the control group.
ESR Method: Has no statistically significant effect on average employment or work but reduces age-based gaps for young males in employment (13.9 pp) and work (12.3 pp).
Heterogeneous Effects:
- LOA is more effective for women, addressing underreporting due to informal activities or social norms.
- ESR is more effective in areas with high informal employment, aiding youth reporting.
Mechanisms: Informal employment and social norms around domestic work drive the results, with LOA addressing gender-specific underreporting and ESR improving youth reporting in high-informality contexts.

Conclusion

The study demonstrates that alternative survey methods like LOA and ESR can improve labor data accuracy, particularly for women and youth. However, ESR incurs higher costs. These findings support better policy decisions by providing more reliable data on labor gaps, while also highlighting cost trade-offs for surveys.