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Prevailing methods for measuring sensitive outcomes confront researchers with an inherent
bias-variance trade-off: direct questioning is prone to a sensitivity bias, while
indirect methods such as list experiments are substantially less precise. We test the
ballot-bag, a novel technique that relaxes this trade-off by mitigating bias in direct questioning
while improving precision over indirect methods. In an experiment in Egypt,
where direct questions on irregular migration are biased, ballot-bag estimates are not
statistically different from those from a list experiment but exhibit significantly lower
variance. Consequently, treatment effects are highly significant via the ballot-bag and
not via the list experiment.
