Legal Origin

La Porta, Rafael, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny (1999) "The Quality of Government," Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, 15(1), pp.222-279. (Appendix B prints out the data)

This data is downloadable at Andrei Shleifer's website.

A slightly modified version (if I understand correctly) is available as the dataset for

La Porta, Rafael, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer. 2008. “The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins.” Journal of Economic Literature 46(2): 285–332.

This data is also downloadable at Andrei Shleifer's website.

International Crime Victim Surveys (ICVS)

The ICVS is cross-country household surveys on crime experiences including corruption.

The survey years are 1989, 1992, 1996/97, 2000/01, 2004/05, and 2010(?).

The following papers use the data on corruption from these surveys.

Hunt, J. (2004) "Trust and Bribery: The Role of the Quid Pro Quo and the Link with Crime."NBER Working Papers 10510, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

Mocan, N. (2008) "What Determines Corruption? International Evidence From Microdata." Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International 46(4): 493-510.

Impact Evaluation Toolkit

The World Bank assembles the know-how of impact evaluation (with a focus on maternal and child health issues).

See also this blog post from Development Impact.

World Population Prospects

Every other year, the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division publishes World Population Prospects, population projections for countries around the world.

The data is downloadable from this webpage.

Microfinance Institution Data

The Mix Market makes available the data on microfinance institutions around the world.

Used by Ahlin et al. (2011) and de Quidt et al. (2012).

Data Collection Methods

STICERD Fieldwork in Development Economics, managed by Markus Goldstein, provides resources useful for doing fieldworks.

Martinelli and Parker (2007) "Deception and Misreporting in a Social Program" provide caution against using self-reporting information on the ownership of status goods (goods that many other people own).

De Mel, McKenzie, Woodruff (2008) provide guidance for measuring microenterprise profits.

Svensson (2003) provides the way to solicit information on bribe payments. See section III.

Delavande, Gine, and McKenzie (2010) discuss how to solicit subjective expectations (such as expected return to schooling) from people in developing countries.

Zwane et al (2011) show that being asked about their behavior does change their behavior subsequently. Researchers should consider the impact of surveys on the outcomes of interest when they design the questionnaire.

Mckenzie (2012) argues that for outcomes serially uncorrelated (such as profits), skipping the baseline survey and conducting multiple follow-up surveys can help increase the statistical power.

Development Impact, the blog by four World Bank economists working on randomized control trials, often reports the studies in which the data collection methods are randomly assigned.

• April 26, 2011: when interviewing a household member privately is good and when it is bad
• April 27, 2011: what method of consumption expenditure survey is the best
• October 11, 2011: how labor supply should be measured for farmers
• October 18, 2011: how access to financial services (bank accounts, insurance, etc.) should be measured.

Demombynes (2012) talks about the need to make your data publicly available.

Kenya rural panel survey conducted by the Tegemeo Institute

See this blog post on how difficult it is to get access to this data.