"How reliable are survey responses when households are asked about past weather shocks — and what does that mean for estimating the true health impact of droughts?"
This is the question Prof. Dr. Annika Herr, Dr. Soschia Karimi and Dr. Julian Wichert set out to answer in their most recent paper titled "Weather shocks, recall error and health", published in the Journal of Development Economics (Vol. 179, Feb 2026)
In this paper, they use panel data to show that the length of recall intervals plays an important role for the reliability of survey results in the context of droughts. Shorter recall intervals lead to a higher likelihood of households reporting past droughts correctly. This in turn suggests that longer survey intervals may lead to substantial recall errors.
The main implication of these findings is that the health burden of extreme weather events is most likely underestimated when relying exclusively on survey results. Such a possible bias has substantial consequences not only for future research designs and the interpretation of results, but also for how policy in regions which are particularly vulnerable to climate change should be shaped.
You can find the full paper, published in the Journal of Development Economics, here.
