Doing the Survey Two-Step : The Effects of Reticence on Estimates of Corruption in Two-Stage Survey Questions
This paper develops a structural approach for modeling how respondents answer survey questions and uses it to estimate the proportion of respondents who are reticent in answering corruption questions, as well as the extent to which reticent behavio...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2015
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/05/24531877/doing-survey-two-step-effects-reticence-estimates-corruption-two-stage-survey-questions http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22008 |
| Summary: | This paper develops a structural
approach for modeling how respondents answer survey
questions and uses it to estimate the proportion of
respondents who are reticent in answering corruption
questions, as well as the extent to which reticent behavior
biases down conventional estimates of corruption. The
context is a common two-step survey question, first
inquiring whether a government official visited a business,
and then asking about bribery if a visit was acknowledged.
Reticence is a concern for both steps, since denying a visit
sidesteps the bribe question. This paper considers two
alternative models of how reticence affects responses to
two-step questions, with differing assumptions on how
reticence affects the first question about visits.
Maximum-likelihood estimates are obtained for seven
countries using data on interactions with tax officials.
Different models work best in different countries, but
cross-country comparisons are still valid because both
models use the same structural parameters. On average, 40
percent of corruption questions are answered reticently,
with much variation across countries. A statistic reflecting
how much standard measures underestimate the proportion of
all respondents who had a bribe interaction is developed.
The downward bias in standard measures is highly
statistically significant in all countries, varying from 12
percent in Nigeria to 90 percent in Turkey. The source of
bias varies widely across countries, between denying a visit
and denying a bribe after admitting a visit. |
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