rafmacalaba/data-use-mentions-extended huggingface dataset:
―budgets, credit, savings accounts, checking accounts, and so forth.‖ Finally, those who answered yes to the third questions were asked whether these courses were required by his or her school. They find that mandates appear to effectively increase exposure to financial education, and have a significant subsequent effect on future savings.

Cole and Shastry (2009) replicate and extend Bernheim et al. (2001) using a much larger sample from census data that allowed for the inclusion of state fixed effects and similar controls for age and education levels. They are also able to include event-year dummies for the implementation of each mandate, an improvement over the original identification strategy. However, their results contradict the original finding that high school education impacts future savings.

The effects of other programs vary depending on the curriculum, the sample, and the methodology.<sup>5</sup> McCormick (2009) provides a good overview of evaluations of youth financial education programs. Some programs start at a very early age; Grody et al. (2008) evaluate a pilot program for third-graders using age-appropriate materials that shows promising results, while Holden et al. (2009) provides a critical overview of financial education programs targeted towards pre-school children.

More innovative strategies have also been used with students. Carlin and Robinson (2010) also employ quasi-experimental design to study the effects of a financial literacy course for high school students, one which involved role-playing fictitious budget situations (Junior Achievement Finance Park). They find that students who attended training were somewhat better 5 Just a few of the other studies in this area include Grimes et al. (2010), another analysis of the long-term effect of high school economics and business courses. They find a positive effect on the probability of having a savings account as an adult, an attribute which was also correlated with knowledge of basic economic concepts. Borden et al. (2008) study a financial education seminar program for college students (Credit Wise Cats), a peer-taught seminar covering
municipalities’ size varies considerably across the country. For instance, the municipality of Altamira (Pará) is the largest in Brazil, with 159,533 square kilometers or 45 thousand times larger than the smaller one, Santa Cruz de Minas (Minas Gerais). The larger the municipality, the larger the probability of our estimation error.

# _Environmental controversies_

Banks face reputational risks when they finance projects that have a negative impact on the environment, especially when the latter are involved in public controversies such as oil spillages or extensive deforestation. The reputational impact is assumed to be greater when the firms are found to have inadequate systems to manage the environmental footprint of their operations. This risk is being increasingly recognized by banks and financial institutions, as information about high-profile environmental degradation becomes part of the investment decision making of

> 20 The 2019 RAIS contains a universe of 7.9 million facilities. We excluded from our sample financial sector facilities and those that did not have employees or kept their activities idle during 2019. After data cleaning, we ended up with 3.9 million establishments, employing a total of 46.5 million active employees.

> 21 In other words: L L i i E E E E i <u>i</u> , where L L i ∑ E E E iiE i ~~�~~ establishment that operates in the sector ii<sup>= LL∗�</sup> NNiii=1 and federal unit ii ii . ii<sup>denote the credit outstanding of the</sup>

> 22 Studies such as DNB (2020) or others related to climate-related risks (e.g., <u>NGFS 2020a) use data from Four Twenty</u> Seven to identify business locations. However, its coverage for Brazil is significantly limited. ii ss ff

11
with paving. But such measures come at an increased short-term construction cost. Within this context, this study aims to estimate resilience gains derived from a set of road-upgrading alternatives for a case study road – the East Road of Malaita – and the comparative costs of upgrading. This test case will both inform decision-making for the East Road and serve as an empirical test of efforts to incorporate resilience considerations in infrastructure project design and selection.

# Malaita Road Network

Malaita is one of largest of the Solomon Islands, with an estimated population of 170,883 (according to 2012/13 HIES). The three primary roads of Malaita, namely the North Road (112.2 km), South Road (75.6 km) and East Road (41.7 km), together constitute nearly 60% of the road network on the island and carry the majority of vehicular traffic (Figure 1). These roads connect 19 of the 33 wards and provide access to 70% of the population.

Generally, however, conditions of the road network are poor, and many of the island's bridges are significantly deteriorated or structurally compromised.<sup>27</sup> Moreover, only 4% of the province's roads are sealed. While some of the sealed segments are short sections in Auki town, most are located along the North and South roads.<sup>28</sup> Only a reported 17.4 km of these main roads are sealed, and the remainder are unsealed coral gravel. Therefore, most of the road network is unsealed, poorly drained, and easily eroded.<sup>29</sup>

> 25 - - Solomon Islands National Development Strategy, 2016-2035. https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/linked <u>documents/cobp sol-2017-2019-ld-01.pdf</u>

> 26 Johnson, S. and Visser, A. (2018). Viability of concrete pavements for low-volume roads in Pacific Islands
The existing empirical literature on migrant selectivity focuses exclusively on observable measures of skills, such as education. For example, Chiquiar and Hanson (2005) find Mexican immigrants to the United States to be positively selected in terms of education and other observable skills. This contrasts with the model of Borjas (1987), which predicts that individuals moving from a country with a less equal income distribution to one with a more equal income distribution will tend to be negatively selected from their home country distribution. The Gini of weekly earnings from wage, salary and selfemployment work in Tonga is 0.338, compared to a Gini of 0.374 in New Zealand,<sup>2</sup> so Borjas’s model would predict positive selection from Tonga. The overstatement of the income gains from migration obtained from the non-experimental methods is consistent with this theory, if migrants from Tonga are positively selected in terms of unobserved ability and skills, conditional on their observed characteristics. We examine selection directly by looking at pre-migration earnings, and do find migrants to be positively selected in terms of unobserved characteristics, with most of this occurring through selection into the lottery, rather than through selective compliance conditional on winning the lottery.

This paper also contributes to the literature started by the influential work of Lalonde (1986), which attempts to assess the ability of non-experimental estimators to obtain estimates similar to experimental results. To date, this literature has concentrated on a small number of labor market training programs. After Lalonde’s initial pessimistic

> 2 Tonga Gini calculated from our sample of workers in non-migrant households; Gini for New Zealand calculated from the 2002 New Zealand Income Survey.

- 5 -
deposit-insurance adoption, design and performance (see for instance, Demirgüç-Kunt and Kane 2002). We show that good supervision can affect the state-varying benefits and costs of deposit insurance. Strong supervision and regulation can enhance the stabilization effects during crisis periods while dampening the negative effects associated with moral hazard during normal times.

While there is widespread agreement in the academic literature that deposit insurance affects bank risk through two channels, stabilization and moral hazard, our paper is the first to document that the net impact of deposit insurance varies with the relative importance of these two effects. Our results indicate that deposit insurance indeed enhanced depositor confidence and had positive stabilization effects during the recent global financial crisis. Our findings also emphasize the role of regulation and supervision in the effectiveness of deposit insurance schemes by maximizing the benefits of deposit insurance while minimizing costs associated with incentives and moral hazard.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the construction of the sample and variables. Section 3 presents the empirical results and discusses the implications. Section 4 concludes.

# **2. Data**

# **2.1. Sample and Bank Level Variables**

Our sample consists of all publicly traded banks covered by the Bankscope database. We use stock market information from Compustat for international banks and stock market information from CRSP for U.S. banks. The Bankscope database reports detailed balance sheet and income statement information for both public and private banks and covers over 90% of the total banking assets in a given country. The Compustat database provides daily stock price information for both active and delisted companies, accounting for 98% of the global stock market capitalization. CRSP is the standard source for stock price information of U.S. companies. Our final sample consists of 4,109 banks in 96 countries over the time period 20042009.

Bank level variables are constructed from the Bankscope database. We follow Laeven and Levine (2009) and compute a traditional measure of bank risk, which is calculated as average bank return on
**Table 1.** Summary statistics number of grids used in the groundwater risk mapping at the national-scale in Bangladesh; area covered under four risk zones under each risk model.

# **Groundwater Risk Map (model 1: arsenic, salinity and groundwater storage)**

|**Risk Zone**|**No of grids**|**Area (km**<sup>**2**</sup>**)**|**Cumulative**<br>**area (km**<sup>**2**</sup>**)**|**Proportion of**<br>**cumulative**<br>**land area (%)**|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Extremely high risk|27|208|208|0.15|
|High risk|955|7,146|7,354|5.26|
|Medium risk|2,299|10,350|17,704|12.66|
|Low risk|5,951|28,123|45,826|32.78|

# **Groundwater Risk Map (model 2: arsenic and salinity only)**

|**Risk Zone**|**No of grids**|**Area (km**<sup>**2**</sup>**)**|**Cumulative**<br>**area (km**<sup>**2**</sup>**)**|**Proportion of**<br>**cumulative**<br>**land area (%)**|
|---|---|---|---|
percent and 100 percent, respectively.

Exploiting the introduction of the Law along with the ex-ante variation in public debt ratios across states, we estimate the impact of public debt ceilings using a difference-in-difference

> 1 From 2011 to 2018 the share of public debt of local governments worldwide increased from 14 to 22 percent (IMF, 2018). Similarly, the Fiscal Monitor of the IMF (2020) details a large increase in local government debt following the COVID-19 outbreak.

> 2 Regarding implicit guarantees, for example, Danish municipalities receive specific financial help from the central government if they get into financial difficulties, and are put under administrative control (Mau, 2015). In Germany, the constitutional court ruled that the federal government had to bail out two Länder (states) in financial distress. The Spanish financial crisis in 2012 was in large part driven by the excessive indebtedness of local regions with the _Cajas_ (Santos, 2017).

> 3 When promulgating the FD Law, President Peña-Nieto noted that “[T]he priority of the law is to ensure the stability of the country's public finances by establishing the requirements and conditions for the government to grant federal approval of the debt contracted by states and municipalities.”

2
|0.0527|(7.83)|-0.0024|(0.50)|
|Asset Score||-|0.0497|(2.22)|
|Female Head of Household|-0.0909|(1.87)|0.0231|(0.59)|
|Age of Head of Household|0.0280|(4.28)|-0.0057|(1.13)|
|Age of Head of Household Squared|-0.0002|(3.42)|0.0000|(0.81)|
|Farmer Household|-0.3116|(7.74)|-0.0631|(2.21)|
|Jawa Tengah|-0.2092|(4.72)|0.2267|(5.13)|
|Nusa Tenggara Timur|-0.6212|(13.37)|0.1161|(2.70)|
|Number of Observations|1137||1137||
|R-squared|0.37||_||
|F-statistic|46.8||_||
|Log Likelihood|_||-430.3||
|Chi-squared|||140.7||
|<br>Probability > Chi-squared|||0.00||

Notes: 1. OLS model with asset score (principal component weights) as dependent variable; reported are coefficients and t-values based on robust standard errors.

2. Probit model of households who increased savings in the past year; reported are probability derivatives at the mean of the explanatory variables (or for 0 to I change in the case of dummy variables) and z-srores based on robust standard errors.

Another aspect of asset accumulation is the ability to have savings. While the LLI questionnaire did not record the amount of savings, it did ask whether households had been able to increase savings in the
Policy Research Working Paper 7777

# **Abstract**

Using data on net exports and factor endowments for more than 100 countries, this paper studies the relationship between factor endowments and comparative advantage in 28 manufacturing sectors between 1975 and 2010. The authors allow for systematic technological differences across countries, including differences in factor intensities across countries with different ratios of skilled labor over unskilled labor. Capital seems to be a source of comparative disadvantage in manufacturing, and skilled labor is a source of comparative advantage in the global sample. However, skilled labor is a source of comparative disadvantage in economies with low human capital, whereas it is a source of comparative advantage in the sample of countries with high human capital. The authors attribute this heterogeneity to the rise of capital mobility across countries, particularly since the mid-1990s.

This paper is a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The authors may be contacted at dlederman@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
Table 1 (continued) : Proposed criteria for assessing housing subsidies programs

|_Criterion_|_Questions to be answered_|_Measurement indicators (examples=* - this is_<br>_not clear)_|
|---|---|---|
|Targeting<br>/<br>Vertical<br>equity (redistribution)|- What is the distribution of transfers (explicit or implicit) implied<br>by the subsidy ?<br>- Who are beneficiaries of the subsidy in theory ?<br>- Are the most needy covered by the subsidy ?|- Estimation of distribution of transfers (explicit or<br>implicit) implied by the subsidy. Depending on the case :<br>- Estimation from tax files<br>- Econometric calculation from survey data<br>- Use of administrative files on beneficiaries<br>- comparison of official targets and effective target<br>possible with type of subsidy and implementation chosen.|
|Coverage/horizontal<br>equity|- What share of the targeted population is covered by the program ?<br>- Does the subsidy introduce different treatments for different kinds<br>of households / firms in the target population ?|- share of the targeted population covered by the<br>program.<br>- subsidy reach in different groups of households / firms<br>within target group.|
|Efficiency|- What is the social loss of resources implied by the subsidy ?<br>- Could the same resources be used more efficiently ?<br>- Which economic margins are affected by the subsidy?|Depending on the case considered:<br>- partial equilibrium calculation<br>- integration of subsidies in complete models of the tax<br>and benefits system<br>_Ad hoc_qualitative assessment<br>_Ad hoc_approach, e.g. :<br>- calculation of multiplier effect of public spending on the<br>program,
the perceived competition threat from informal firms, which is not necessarily correlated with an existing actual threat.

# **References**

- Abadie, A. and G. W. Imbens (2011). Bias-corrected matching estimators for average treatment effects. _Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 29_ (1), 1–11.

- Amin, M. (2021). Does competition from informal firms hurt job creation by formal firms? evidence using firm-level survey data. _World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9515_ .

- Amin, M. and C. Okou (2020). Casting a shadow: Productivity of formal firms and informality. _Review of Development Economics, 24_ (4), 1610–1630.

18
Policy Research Working Paper 10661

# **Abstract**

Despite substantial progress in closing the gender gap, women’s labor force participation in the Middle East and North Africa remains one of the lowest globally, at a mere 18 percent. This paper investigates the effect of the introduction of unilateral divorce laws on women’s labor outcomes, using data from the Demographic and Health Survey program that spans decades and a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences design in three countries: Morocco, the Arab Republic of Egypt, and Jordan. The results highlight that no-fault divorce legislation was associated with a modest increase in mothers’ labor outcomes, measured by current employment, a few years after the reform. These findings are likely induced by a power shift and anticipatory effects that drive women into the labor force. However, when a longer time window is considered, 10 or more years after the reform, the study documents a negative effect of the reform on women’s labor outcomes in Morocco, and a positive effect in the Arab Republic of Egypt and Jordan. These differences can be attributed to a set of countervailing effects, including social norms, labor market dynamics, and evolution of the legislation, that make the derived utility from marriage, in some cases, more attractive than that derived from employment, and vice versa. These findings partially confirm results from previous research on the relationship between no-fault divorce and women’s agency and empowerment in the Middle East and North Africa region, but, at the same time, contrast with prominent perspectives on legislation that aims at reducing gender-based discrimination. Instead, they show that there might be undesired effects of legislation and provide a policy relevant discussion on that basis.

This paper is a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Middle East and North Africa Region. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://
The construction of the four income measures requires putting together several fiscal interventions. Table B2 in the appendix provides a list of all the interventions included in our analysis, indicating whether the information used was directly available in the household survey or needed to be imputed or simulated, when either the status (beneficiary/payer) or the amount received/paid was not reported directly in the survey.

The total amounts of revenue or spending from the survey (including imputations) do not always coincide with those from administrative data. This is to be expected. For many cases, these total amounts are nevertheless, comparable. But the range is wide and, in some cases, it is worth explaining the possible reasons behind the differences. For instance, the total amount of the personal income tax allocated or retrieved from households in the survey is about 57 percent of the total amount in the administrative dataset. In part, this reflects the limitation of household surveys to adequately capture information on the households at the top of the income distribution due to underreporting or non-response of rich households. The calculation of VAT provides another example of the data limitations. The VAT amount included in the analysis accounts for only 38 percent of the amount in administrative records due to the exclusion of durable goods from the analysis and the fact that final consumption of households only makes up for a portion of the total VAT. This is, however, a limitation that is standard for this type of analysis and as is recommended practice, for each of the fiscal components modeled in the analysis we present a detailed analysis of macro-validation in Appendix B.

# Results

Combining households’ contributions and benefits to the fiscal system, five key features emerge. These features are summarized in Figures 4 and 5. Figure 4 shows the average taxes and contributions paid per year by each household market income decile (with bars below the horizontal axis), the average benefits received (bars above the horizontal axis) and the net impact (red dots), expressed in RMB. Figure 5
# **_3.1 Public Infrastructure and Economic Growth_**

In parallel to the increase of political interest in public investments toward the end of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, scholars began exploring the importance of infrastructure investment, particularly in relation to economic growth (Table 2). Taking advantage of different methodologies and various geographical locations, this strand of literature resulted in a wide range of estimates.

Focusing on North America, the literature offers evidence supporting the hypothesis that public infrastructure positively impacts economic growth (Munnell 1990; Garcia-Mila & <mark>McGuire</mark> 1992; <mark>Rives & Heaney</mark> 1995; Wylie 1996). For example, Munnell (1990) looked at the relationship between public capital and measures of economic activity at the state level. Munnell, then, concluded that public capital has a significant, positive impact on output, although the output elasticity was roughly one-half the size of the national estimate (Aschauer 1989a). Similarly, Garcia-Mila and <mark>McGuire</mark> (1992) used data on 48 contiguous states from 1969 to 1983 to estimate the impact of public infrastructure (captured by education and highways) on gross state product. The estimates were consistent with Munnell’s (1990) results, both in terms of the sign and the magnitude. Focusing on the economic performance at the community level, Fox and Smith (1990) and Rives and Heaney (1995) show investments contribute to U.S. local economies positively and significantly. Examining the role infrastructure on economic growth in Canada, Wylie (1996) finds that output elasticities of infrastructure in Canada are comparable and even larger than that in the United States.

The findings should, however, be interpreted carefully as the methodologies used in these studies have several limitations. The estimation techniques used to suffer from the endogeneity of the public capital stock and economic performance, spurious correlation, reverse causality where the causation also runs from the economic measures to the