- Authors: Nathan Franz and Sangita Vyas
- R&R at Journal of Development Economics
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When assessing policy impact in self-reported data, how can one distinguish between genuine behavior change and reporting bias? We study this question in the context of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), a large-scale sanitation program in India. Official statistics based on self-reports suggest a large reduction in open defecation. However, consistent with reported measures of open defecation becoming a noisier signal following the program, we find that the association between child height and reported open defecation is flatter after the sanitation program compared to before. Attenuation is even greater in places in which the SBM was implemented more intensely, is specific to the post-program period, and is absent in urban India, which is consistent with the program’s focus on rural latrine construction. We characterize the weak conditions under which these empirical patterns imply greater misreporting of open defecation following the program. Under stronger conditions, our results imply that half or more rural Indian households still defecate in the open, versus 26 percent who self-report doing so. If true, widespread open defecation in rural India continues to harm children’s health and survival.