cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.3886/e114159v1
title: Replication data for: A Model of Secular Stagnation: Theory and Quantitative Evaluation

description: This paper formalizes and quantifies the secular stagnation hypothesis, defined as a persistently low or negative natural rate of interest leading to a chronically binding zero lower bound (ZLB). Output-inflation dynamics and policy prescriptions are fundamentally different from those in the standard New Keynesian framework. Using a 56-period quantitative life cycle model, a standard calibration to US data delivers a natural rate ranging from −1.5% to −2%, implying an elevated risk of ZLB episodes for the foreseeable future. We decompose the contribution of demographic and technological factors to the decline in interest rates since 1970 and quantify changes required to restore higher rates.
DOI: 10.3886/e113151
title: Replication data for: From Final Goods to Inputs: The Protectionist Effect of Rules of Origin

description: Recent decades have witnessed a surge of trade in intermediate goods and a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). FTAs use rules of origin (RoO) to distinguish goods originating from member countries from those originating from third countries. We focus on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the world's largest FTA, and construct a unique dataset that allows us to map the input-output linkages in its RoO. Exploiting cross-product and cross-country variation in treatment over time, we show that NAFTA RoO led to a sizable reduction in imports of intermediate goods from third countries relative to NAFTA partners.
DOI: 10.3886/e113151v1
title: Replication data for: From Final Goods to Inputs: The Protectionist Effect of Rules of Origin

description: Recent decades have witnessed a surge of trade in intermediate goods and a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). FTAs use rules of origin (RoO) to distinguish goods originating from member countries from those originating from third countries. We focus on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the world's largest FTA, and construct a unique dataset that allows us to map the input-output linkages in its RoO. Exploiting cross-product and cross-country variation in treatment over time, we show that NAFTA RoO led to a sizable reduction in imports of intermediate goods from third countries relative to NAFTA partners.
DOI: 10.3886/e113152
title: Replication data for: Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

description: Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillover effects of teaching and shows that ignoring these spillovers underestimates a teacher's value by at least 30 percent. Because the spillovers also affect teacher value-added estimates, I develop a method of moments estimator of teacher value-added and show that accounting for the spillovers does not have a large impact on the ranking of teachers in New York City. I conclude by showing that the spillovers occur within groups of students who share the same race and gender, which suggests that social networks play a critical role in disseminating the effect.
DOI: 10.3886/e113152v1
title: Replication data for: Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

description: Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillover effects of teaching and shows that ignoring these spillovers underestimates a teacher's value by at least 30 percent. Because the spillovers also affect teacher value-added estimates, I develop a method of moments estimator of teacher value-added and show that accounting for the spillovers does not have a large impact on the ranking of teachers in New York City. I conclude by showing that the spillovers occur within groups of students who share the same race and gender, which suggests that social networks play a critical role in disseminating the effect.
DOI: 10.3886/e113153
title: Replication data for: The Impact of Family Income on Child Achievement: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit: Reply

description: Dahl and Lochner (2012) provides some of the first causal evidence of the effects of family income on child achievement using changes in the Earned Income Tax Credit. Unfortunately, a coding error in the creation of total family income affects the first stage estimates and inflates the instrumental variable (IV) estimates. Importantly, it does not affect the reduced-form estimates or alter statistical significance of the IV estimates. This response shows that correcting this error does not alter the core findings or main message of the paper.
DOI: 10.3886/e113153v1
title: Replication data for: The Impact of Family Income on Child Achievement: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit: Reply

description: Dahl and Lochner (2012) provides some of the first causal evidence of the effects of family income on child achievement using changes in the Earned Income Tax Credit. Unfortunately, a coding error in the creation of total family income affects the first stage estimates and inflates the instrumental variable (IV) estimates. Importantly, it does not affect the reduced-form estimates or alter statistical significance of the IV estimates. This response shows that correcting this error does not alter the core findings or main message of the paper.
DOI: 10.3886/e113399
title: Replication data for: Understanding Ethnic Identity in Africa: Evidence from the Implicit Association Test (IAT)

description: We use a variant of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine individuals' implicit attitudes towards various ethnic groups. Using a population from the Democratic Republic of Congo, we find that the IAT measures show evidence of an implicit bias in favor of one's own ethnicity. Individuals have implicit views of their own ethnic group that are more positive than their implicit views of other ethnic groups. We find this implicit bias to be quantitatively smaller than the (explicit) bias one finds when using self-reported attitudes about different ethnic groups.
DOI: 10.3886/e113400
title: Replication data for: Loyalty, Exit, and Enforcement: Evidence from a Kenya Dairy Cooperative

description: Organizations depend on members' "loyalty" for their success. Studying a cooperative's attempt to increase deliveries by members, we show that the threat of sanctions leads to highly heterogeneous response among members. Despite the cooperative not actually enforcing the threatened sanctions, positive effects for some members persist for several months. Other members "exit," stopping delivering altogether. Among non-compliant members we document substantial heterogeneity in beliefs about the legitimacy of the sanctions. This lack of common understanding highlights the role played by managers in organizations and provides a candidate explanation for lack of sanctions enforcement documented by Ostrom (1990) and other studies.
DOI: 10.3886/e113400v1
title: Replication data for: Loyalty, Exit, and Enforcement: Evidence from a Kenya Dairy Cooperative

description: Organizations depend on members' "loyalty" for their success. Studying a cooperative's attempt to increase deliveries by members, we show that the threat of sanctions leads to highly heterogeneous response among members. Despite the cooperative not actually enforcing the threatened sanctions, positive effects for some members persist for several months. Other members "exit," stopping delivering altogether. Among non-compliant members we document substantial heterogeneity in beliefs about the legitimacy of the sanctions. This lack of common understanding highlights the role played by managers in organizations and provides a candidate explanation for lack of sanctions enforcement documented by Ostrom (1990) and other studies.
DOI: 10.3886/e113401
title: Replication data for: The Catch-22 of External Validity in the Context of Constraints to Firm Growth

description: We document the presence of multiple and varied constraints to small and medium firm growth. This presents both a practical problem for business training programs and a challenge to academic economists trying to identify mechanisms though which these programs may affect outcomes. External validity needs theory. This pushes researchers to narrowly defined and highly selected sample frames, which limits the potential for clear, generalizable policy prescriptions. Ultimately, larger samples, multi-arm evaluations, process documentation, and narrowly-focused, theory-supported empirical work are all needed, but the complexity of the problem limits what we learn from any single study.
DOI: 10.3886/e113401v1
title: Replication data for: The Catch-22 of External Validity in the Context of Constraints to Firm Growth

description: We document the presence of multiple and varied constraints to small and medium firm growth. This presents both a practical problem for business training programs and a challenge to academic economists trying to identify mechanisms though which these programs may affect outcomes. External validity needs theory. This pushes researchers to narrowly defined and highly selected sample frames, which limits the potential for clear, generalizable policy prescriptions. Ultimately, larger samples, multi-arm evaluations, process documentation, and narrowly-focused, theory-supported empirical work are all needed, but the complexity of the problem limits what we learn from any single study.
DOI: 10.3886/e113402v1
title: Replication data for: The Market for Training Services: A Demand Experiment with Bangladeshi Garment Factories

description: We marketed a training program for lower level managers (line supervisors) to large factories in the Bangladeshi ready-made garment industry. Take-up of the program (even for a free slot) was low, due to intense production pressures, fire-fighting and concerns over retention of trained workers. Take-up is quite insensitive to pricing. There was higher interest and demand in training modules aimed at improving production processes and quality, rather than human resources and social compliance. Since the program was priced close to a commercially viable rate, it might be possible to develop a market provided they could be proved to be effective.
DOI: 10.3886/e113655
title: Replication data for: Education and Mortality: Evidence from a Social Experiment

description: We examine the effects on mortality and health due to a major Swedish educational reform that increased the years of compulsory schooling. Using the gradual phase-in of the reform between 1949 and 1962 across municipalities, we estimate insignificant effects of the reform on mortality in the affected cohort. From the confidence intervals, we can rule out effects larger than 1–1.4 months of increased life expectancy. We find no significant impacts on mortality for individuals of low socioeconomic status backgrounds, on deaths that are more likely to be affected by behavior, on hospitalizations, and consumption of prescribed drugs.
DOI: 10.3886/e113656
title: Replication data for: Patents as a Spur to Subsequent Innovation? Evidence from Pharmaceuticals

description: This paper examines how an incumbent's patent protection acts as an implicit subsidy toward non-infringing substitutes. I analyze whether classes of pharmaceuticals whose first entrant has a longer period of market exclusivity (time between approval and generic entry) see more subsequent entry. Instrumenting for exclusivity using plausibly exogenous delays in the development process, I find that a one-year increase in the first entrant's market exclusivity increases subsequent entry by 0.2 drugs. The effect is stronger for subsequent entrants that are lesser clinical advances, suggesting it is driven primarily by imitation.
DOI: 10.3886/e113657
title: Replication data for: Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program

description: This paper presents results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop per Child program, using data collected after 15 months of implementation in 318 primary schools in rural Peru. The program increased the ratio of computers per student from 0.12 to 1.18 in treatment schools. This expansion in access translated into substantial increases in use of computers both at school and at home. No evidence is found of effects on test scores in math and language. There is some evidence, though inconclusive, about positive effects on general cognitive skills.
DOI: 10.3886/e113657v1
title: Replication data for: Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program

description: This paper presents results from a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop per Child program, using data collected after 15 months of implementation in 318 primary schools in rural Peru. The program increased the ratio of computers per student from 0.12 to 1.18 in treatment schools. This expansion in access translated into substantial increases in use of computers both at school and at home. No evidence is found of effects on test scores in math and language. There is some evidence, though inconclusive, about positive effects on general cognitive skills.
DOI: 10.3886/e113658
title: Replication data for: The Impact of Maternal Literacy and Participation Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in India

description: Using a randomized field experiment in India, we evaluate the effectiveness of adult literacy and parental involvement interventions in improving children's learning. Households were assigned to receive either adult literacy (language and math) classes for mothers, training for mothers on how to enhance their children's learning at home, or a combination of the two programs. All three interventions had significant but modest impacts on childrens math scores. The interventions also increased mothers' test scores in both language and math, as well as a range of other outcomes reflecting greater involvement of mothers in their children's education.
DOI: 10.3886/e113658v1
title: Replication data for: The Impact of Maternal Literacy and Participation Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in India

description: Using a randomized field experiment in India, we evaluate the effectiveness of adult literacy and parental involvement interventions in improving children's learning. Households were assigned to receive either adult literacy (language and math) classes for mothers, training for mothers on how to enhance their children's learning at home, or a combination of the two programs. All three interventions had significant but modest impacts on childrens math scores. The interventions also increased mothers' test scores in both language and math, as well as a range of other outcomes reflecting greater involvement of mothers in their children's education.
DOI: 10.3886/e113659
title: Replication data for: Moving to Opportunity or Isolation? Network Effects of a Randomized Housing Lottery in Urban India

description: A housing lottery in an Indian city provided winning slum dwellers the opportunity to move into improved housing on the city's periphery. Fourteen years later, winners report improved housing but no change in tenure security, family income, or human capital. Winners also report increased isolation from family and caste networks and reduced informal insurance. We observe significant program exit: 34 percent of winners never took up subsidized housing and 32 percent eventually exited. Our results suggest negligible long-run economic value of this expensive public program and point to the importance of considering social networks in housing programs for the poor.
DOI: 10.3886/e113659v1
title: Replication data for: Moving to Opportunity or Isolation? Network Effects of a Randomized Housing Lottery in Urban India

description: A housing lottery in an Indian city provided winning slum dwellers the opportunity to move into improved housing on the city's periphery. Fourteen years later, winners report improved housing but no change in tenure security, family income, or human capital. Winners also report increased isolation from family and caste networks and reduced informal insurance. We observe significant program exit: 34 percent of winners never took up subsidized housing and 32 percent eventually exited. Our results suggest negligible long-run economic value of this expensive public program and point to the importance of considering social networks in housing programs for the poor.
DOI: 10.3886/e113924
title: Replication data for: High-Dimensional Methods and Inference on Structural and Treatment Effects

description: Data with a large number of variables relative to the sample size—"high-dimensional data"—are readily available and increasingly common in empirical economics. High-dimensional data arise through a combination of two phenomena. First, the data may be inherently high dimensional in that many different characteristics per observation are available. For example, the US Census collects information on hundreds of individual characteristics and scanner datasets record transaction-level data for households across a wide range of products. Second, even when the number of available variables is relatively small, researchers rarely know the exact functional form with which the small number of variables enter the model of interest. Researchers are thus faced with a large set of potential variables formed by different ways of interacting and transforming the underlying variables. This paper provides an overview of how innovations in "data mining" can be adapted and modified to provide high-quality inference about model parameters. Note that we use the term "data mining" in a modern sense which denotes a principled search for "true" predictive power that guards against false discovery and overfitting, does not erroneously equate in-sample fit to out-of-sample predictive ability, and accurately accounts for using the same data to examine many different hypotheses or models.
DOI: 10.3886/e113924v1
title: Replication data for: High-Dimensional Methods and Inference on Structural and Treatment Effects

description: Data with a large number of variables relative to the sample size—"high-dimensional data"—are readily available and increasingly common in empirical economics. High-dimensional data arise through a combination of two phenomena. First, the data may be inherently high dimensional in that many different characteristics per observation are available. For example, the US Census collects information on hundreds of individual characteristics and scanner datasets record transaction-level data for households across a wide range of products. Second, even when the number of available variables is relatively small, researchers rarely know the exact functional form with which the small number of variables enter the model of interest. Researchers are thus faced with a large set of potential variables formed by different ways of interacting and transforming the underlying variables. This paper provides an overview of how innovations in "data mining" can be adapted and modified to provide high-quality inference about model parameters. Note that we use the term "data mining" in a modern sense which denotes a principled search for "true" predictive power that guards against false discovery and overfitting, does not erroneously equate in-sample fit to out-of-sample predictive ability, and accurately accounts for using the same data to examine many different hypotheses or models.
DOI: 10.3886/e113925
title: Replication data for: Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics

description: Computers are now involved in many economic transactions and can capture data associated with these transactions, which can then be manipulated and analyzed. Conventional statistical and econometric techniques such as regression often work well, but there are issues unique to big datasets that may require different tools. First, the sheer size of the data involved may require more powerful data manipulation tools. Second, we may have more potential predictors than appropriate for estimation, so we need to do some kind of variable selection. Third, large datasets may allow for more flexible relationships than simple linear models. Machine learning techniques such as decision trees, support vector machines, neural nets, deep learning, and so on may allow for more effective ways to model complex relationships. In this essay, I will describe a few of these tools for manipulating and analyzing big data. I believe that these methods have a lot to offer and should be more widely known and used by economists.
DOI: 10.3886/e113925v1
title: Replication data for: Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics

description: Computers are now involved in many economic transactions and can capture data associated with these transactions, which can then be manipulated and analyzed. Conventional statistical and econometric techniques such as regression often work well, but there are issues unique to big datasets that may require different tools. First, the sheer size of the data involved may require more powerful data manipulation tools. Second, we may have more potential predictors than appropriate for estimation, so we need to do some kind of variable selection. Third, large datasets may allow for more flexible relationships than simple linear models. Machine learning techniques such as decision trees, support vector machines, neural nets, deep learning, and so on may allow for more effective ways to model complex relationships. In this essay, I will describe a few of these tools for manipulating and analyzing big data. I believe that these methods have a lot to offer and should be more widely known and used by economists.
DOI: 10.3886/e113926
title: Replication data for: Political Campaigns and Big Data

description: Modern campaigns develop databases of detailed information about citizens to inform electoral strategy and to guide tactical efforts. Despite sensational reports about the value of individual consumer data, the most valuable information campaigns acquire comes from the behaviors and direct responses provided by citizens themselves. Campaign data analysts develop models using this information to produce individual-level predictions about citizens' likelihoods of performing certain political behaviors, of supporting candidates and issues, and of changing their support conditional on being targeted with specific campaign interventions. The use of these predictive scores has increased dramatically since 2004, and their use could yield sizable gains to campaigns that harness them. At the same time, their widespread use effectively creates a coordination game with incomplete information between allied organizations. As such, organizations would benefit from partitioning the electorate to not duplicate efforts, but legal and political constraints preclude that possibility.