Measuring the unmeasured: Aggregating, anchoring, and adjusting to estimate small business performance

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Anderson, Stephen J.; Lazicky, Christy; Zia, Bilal
• 署名单位: University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin; The World Bank
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102655
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: Microenterprises; small firms; SMEs; measurement; sales; profits; Underreporting; Evaluation; survey methods

摘要

Business sales and profits for small firms are notoriously difficult to measure, with multiple sources of measurement and recall error. This paper introduces a new survey methodology that combines data triangulation with dynamic adjustment to arrive at plausible estimates of these performance outcomes. Business data across three emerging markets show this aggregating, anchoring, and adjusting (AAA) method consistently outperforms the traditional self-reported measure of sales, while the improvement in profits is more nuanced. Consequently, the paper offers a light version that harnesses the gains of AAA in estimating sales to prime and elicit an aided recall of profits, which correlates highly with AAA profits and reduces survey time and cost. The gains in reliability and accuracy result in much higher statistical power of detecting impacts and estimating required sample sizes in field studies.