Thomas Sohnesen

Thomas Sohnesen
Independent consultant

About

44
Publications
9,601
Reads
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420
Citations
Additional affiliations
November 2002 - present
World Bank
Position
  • Economist

Publications

Publications (44)
Article
Full-text available
We examine how returns to education have evolved in the context of post‐conflict reconstruction and economic growth in Mozambique over the period 1996–2015. We show that private rates of return to education have declined at lower levels of schooling, but remained stable and possibly even increased at the highest levels. Returns are increasingly con...
Article
Poverty reduction in low‐ and middle‐income countries is increasingly an urban challenge, and a challenge that continues to be constrained by lack of data, including data on the spatial distribution of poverty within cities. Utilizing existing household survey data in combination with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) applied to high‐resolution s...
Article
Frequent measurement of poverty is challenging because measurement often relies on complex and expensive expenditure surveys that try to measure expenditures on a comprehensive consumption aggregate. This paper investigates the use of consumption “subaggregates” instead. The use of consumption subaggregates is theoretically justified if and only if...
Article
Full-text available
For disaster emergency response, timely information is critical and satellite data is a potential source for such information. High-resolution optical satellite images are often the most informative, but these are only available on cloud-free days. For some extreme weather disasters, like cyclones, access to cloud-free images is unlikely for days b...
Article
Full-text available
In 2015, Ethiopia experienced one of its worst droughts in decades. Using nationally representative data from before and after the event, we do not find evidence that this drought led to widespread increases in chronic or acute child undernutrition. However, further analysis indicates that chronic undernutrition rates did increase in drought-expose...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change is likely to lead to more frequent and more severe droughts with risk of socio-economic suffering. Utilization of satellite data, available almost instantaneously, is a great tool now providing the backbone of drought monitoring. However, the measurement of drought for socio-economic impact is poorly understood, questioning our abili...
Research
Full-text available
Cognitive and non-cognitive tests are key factors in many aspects of economics, especially within labour market analysis. Non-cognitive tests and personality traits are increasingly used, as these are found to be as critical as cognitive abilities for labour market outcomes, while they might be more malleable through life. Intake of caffeine and s...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract: This paper estimates how private returns to education have evolved in the context of postconflict transformation in Mozambique. This has been characterized by rapid economic growth, significant expansion of the schooling system, but also limited structural change in a labour market dominated by small-scale agricultural activity. We find c...
Article
Full-text available
This article presents the results of the latest poverty and inequality mapping update using the 2012 Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) survey and the 2011 census. This mapping builds on the methodology outlined by Chris Elbers and colleagues and further innovates by including new methodological developments. The results presented here allow...
Preprint
Full-text available
In 2015, Ethiopia experienced one of its worst droughts in decades. Using nationally representative data from before and after this event, we find that this drought did not lead to widespread increases in chronic or acute child undernutrition rates in the country. However, chronic undernutrition rates increased due to the drought in areas character...
Article
Full-text available
Reducing child undernutrition is a key social policy objective of the Ethiopian government. Despite substantial reduction over the last decade and a half, child undernutrition is still high; with 48 percent of children either stunted, underweight or wasted, undernutrition remains an important child health challenge. The existing literature highligh...
Data
Mean in survey and census of variables in prediction models. (DOCX)
Data
Regional prediction models for stunting and underweight. (DOCX)
Article
Random forest (RF) is in many fields of research a common method for data-driven predictions. Within economics and prediction of poverty, RF is rarely used. Comparing out-of-sample predictions in surveys for the same year in six countries shows that RF is often more accurate than current common practice (multiple imputations with variables selected...
Article
Employment in Household Enterprises (HEs) has been an integral part of the recent economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Yet employment and development strategies tend to exclude the sector, despite the fact that households with HEs tend to be richer. A good example is Mozambique, where 34% of households rely on income from this source. Analy...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Frequent tracking of poverty is a challenge, as poverty measures often rely on complex and expensive consumption expenditure surveys. We investigate if reduced consumption ag- gregates, theoretically and empirically, can be used to track poverty between comprehensive consumption expenditure surveys. We show theoretically how reduced aggregates that...
Article
Does the same question asked of the same population yield the same answer in face-to-face interviews when other parts of the questionnaire are altered? If not, what would be the implications for proxy-based poverty measurement? Relying on a randomized household survey experiment implemented in Malawi, this study finds that observationally equivalen...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Measuring poverty via proxies instead of through consumption expenditure surveys is attractive, as collecting proxies is cheaper and simpler. The lower cost is ideal for both tracking poverty and also for measuring poverty in other types of surveys, or for measuring project impact. Evaluating the accuracy of poverty predictions based on different p...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Household enterprises -- usually one-person-operated tiny informal enterprises -- are a rapidly growing source of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in lower-income countries. Household enterprises tend to operate with limited interest or support from governments. This is the case in Mozambique, where neither the poverty reduction strateg...
Data
Full-text available
Despite 40 percent of households relying on household enterprises (non-farm enterprises operated by a single individual or with the help of family members) as an income source, household enterprises are usually ignored in low-income Sub-Saharan-African development strategies. Yet analysis of eight countries shows that although the fast growing econ...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Main results and lessons for the future 1 This note sums up results and lessons learned from an impact assessment of school closures on dropout rates in Bulgaria. The assessment was undertaken jointly by the Government of Bulgaria's Impact Evaluation Task Force and the World Bank. The assessment was undertaken to guide policy, but also to provide o...
Article
Full-text available
This paper analyzes how doctors' practices in Paraguay differ across patients, physicians, and facilities. In the absence of claims or chart data, we constructed a measure of "doctor effort" based on observations of doctor-patient interactions. There is little difference in effort for patients from different backgrounds, but large differences acros...
Article
Full-text available
Although patient satisfaction is a commonly applied measure when evaluating health services, there are lingering doubts about its validity. This paper will examine the model of satisfaction which presumes that patients judge their level of satisfaction by comparing their experience of care with their prior expectations by reporting on an interview-...
Article
Full-text available
This paper complements the findings of Atal, Ñopo and Winder (2009) on gender and ethnic wage gaps for 18 Latin American countries circa 2005 by analyzing gender wage gaps for the same countries between circa 1992 and circa 2007. During this span the overall gender earnings gaps dropped about 7 percentage points, while the unexplained component dro...

Questions

Question (1)
Question
I'm interested in what current knowledge/experience is with the link between quality of responds and length of interview, from lengthy household surveys implemented face-to-face with either paper or CAPI.

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