TY  - BOOK
AU  - Aiken,Emily
AU  - Bellue,Suzanne
AU  - Blumenstock,Joshua
AU  - Karlan,Dean
AU  - Udry,Christopher R.
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Estimating Impact with Surveys versus Digital Traces: Evidence from Randomized Cash Transfers in Togo 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2023///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
KW  - Large Data Sets: Modeling and Analysis
KW  - jelc
KW  - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
KW  - Government Policy • Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
N1  - October 2023; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - Do non-traditional digital trace data and traditional survey data yield similar estimates of the impact of a cash transfer program? In a randomized controlled trial of Togo's COVID-19 Novissi program, endline survey data indicate positive treatment effects on beneficiary food security, mental health, and self-perceived economic status. However, impact estimates based on mobile phone data - processed with machine learning to predict beneficiary welfare - do not yield similar results, even though related data and methods do accurately predict wealth and consumption in prior cross-sectional analysis in Togo. This limitation likely arises from the underlying difficulty of using mobile phone data to predict short-term changes in wellbeing within a rural population with fairly homogeneous baseline levels of poverty. We discuss the implications of these results for using new digital data sources in impact evaluation
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w31751
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w31751
ER  -