Reproducibility package for Closing the Gaps: The Role of Screening Questions and Self-Reporting in Measuring Women’s and Young People’s Employment and Work

Can alternative survey methods address the underreporting of women’s and young men’s labor market outcomes, and thus improve the measurement of the underlying gender- and age-based gaps? We address this question using a survey experiment in El Salvador that compares two alternative survey methods (including a List of Activities survey module (LOA) to help identifying labor activities and enforcing self-responses (ESR) in the labor module) against the business-as-usual method in household surveys, which consists of proxy responses without a LOA module. We show that including the LOA module results in higher work and employment rates for the average respondent when compared to the business-as-usual method. Notably, the work gap between men and women falls with the LOA module by 8.1 percentage points. Moreover, the age gap for male respondents’ employment and work rates falls by 13.9 pp and 12.3 pp with ESR. We document that these results can be determined by the prevalence of peers’ informal employment or by social norms related to domestic obligations.