TY  - JOUR
AU  - Crossley, Thomas F
AU  - Winter, Joachim K
TI  - Asking Households About Expenditures: What Have We Learned?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 19543
PY  - 2013
Y2  - October 2013
DO  - 10.3386/w19543
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19543
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19543.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Thomas Crossley
Department of Economics
European University Institute
Fiesole,  FI
Italy
E-Mail: tfcrossley@gmail.com

Joachim Winter
Department of Economics
LMU Munich
Ludwigstr. 33
D-80539 Munich
Germany
E-Mail: joachim.winter@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
M1  - published as Thomas F. Crossley, Joachim K. Winter. "Asking Households about Expenditures: What Have We Learned?," in Christopher D. Carroll, Thomas F. Crossley, and John Sabelhaus, editors, "Improving the Measurement of Consumer Expenditures" University of Chicago Press (2015)

M3  - presented at "Conference on Research in Income and Wealth", December 2-3, 2011
AB  - When designing household surveys, including surveys that measure consumption expenditure, numerous choices need to be made. Which survey mode should be used? Do recall questions or diaries provide more reliable expenditure data? How should the concept of a household be defined? How should the length of the recall period, the level of aggregation of expenditure items, and the response format be chosen? How are responses affected by incentives? Can computer-assisted surveys be used to reduce or correct response error in real time? In this paper, we provide a selective review of the literature on these questions. We also suggest some promising directions for future research.
ER  -