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Longitudinal household data can have considerable advantages over much more widely used cross-sectional data for capturing dynamic demographic relationships. However, a disturbing feature of such data is that there is often substantial attrition and this may make the interpretation of estimates problematic. Such attrition may be particularly severe where there is considerable migration between rural and urban areas. Many analysts share the intuition that attrition is likely to be selective on characteristics such as schooling and thus that high attrition is likely to bias estimates. This paper considers the extent and implications of attrition for three longitudinal household surveys from Bolivia, Kenya, and South Africa that report very high per-year attrition rates between survey rounds. Our estimates indicate that: (a) the means for a number of critical outcome and family background variables differ significantly between …