rafmacalaba/data-use-mentions-extended huggingface dataset:
Policy Research Working Paper 10898

# **Abstract**

This paper provides the first global analysis of the impact of conflict exposure on firm performance, combining geolocalized longitudinal firm-level data with information on political violence events across 89 countries between 2006 and 2019. The results show that higher conflict exposure leads to declines in both sales and total costs, resulting in no significant effect on profits for surviving firms. The reduction in sales is driven by lower output, which reflects conflict-induced shortages of raw materials and production inputs, as well as increased informal competition. Firms respond to declining sales by adjusting labor costs, substituting skilled workers with unskilled ones. The negative effects of conflict on firms are more pronounced in countries with high trade openness, low economic complexity, weak bureaucratic quality, involvement in illegal drug production, or an initial state of peace. In these contexts, greater conflict exposure leads to reductions in both sales and profits.

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://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at aislam@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 S1.5.** Predictor Balance for Synthetic Jordan, Polity IV Index

||**Real Jordan**|**Sample means**|**OIC all**|**OIC minus PAK**|**OIC SAL**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Polity II (1975)|−10.000|2.104|−9.000|−9.000|−9.000|
|Polity II (1985)|−9.000|−1.201|−8.685|−8.685|−8.000|
|Political rights|5.667|4.409|5.646|5.646|5.371|
|Civil liberties|5.600|4.370|6.124|6.124|4.781|
|Exec. constraints|1.467|0.360|1.126|1.126|1.467|
|Presidential|1.000|0.556|1.000|1.000|1.000|
|Parliamentary|0.000|0.271|0.000|0.000|0.000|
|Civil law|1.000|0.757|1.000|1.000|1.000|
|Common law|0.000|0.325|0.000|0.000|0.000|
|Muslim law|1.000|0.222|1.000|1.000|1.000|

_Source_ : Authors’ analysis of the Polity IV index. Additional data come from the Polity IV dataset, Freedom House, the Database of Political Institutions (DPI), and the JuriGlobe database. _Note_ : Table presents pre-treatment predictor variables for Jordan, their corresponding
# **4. Discussion**

## **4.1. Findings Summary**

To identify the effect of behaviorally informed vaccine messaging on vaccine intentions, we conducted 28 randomized survey experiments about COVID-19 vaccination across 23 mostly low- or middle-income countries and territories, recruiting participants through social media. In this individual participant data meta-analysis, among the unvaccinated, we found that behaviorally informed messages significantly increased the odds of having the intention to get vaccinated by 1.28 times overall, with significant impacts of specific framings ranging from 1.16 times (variant framing) to 1.45 times (experts and religious leaders framing), compared to the control group (i.e., no message). The messages using experts and religious leaders showed the largest impacts, followed by endemic, messages with experts and celebrities, efficacy and pro-social, messages with experts, variants, and dynamic social norms. However, the safety message did not significantly increase vaccination intentions across studies. While some framings exhibited larger effects than others, it is important to interpret these impacts considering differences in implementation—as some framings (e.g., experts and safety) were used across more than a dozen studies while other framings were tested in fewer studies as the pandemic evolved (e.g., variants). In addition, it should be reiterated that our findings represent effects for populations who are active on social media and self-selected into a survey about COVID-19, and outcomes reflected selfreported intentions immediately following message exposure.

Messages using experts and celebrities, messages using experts and religious leaders, and dynamic social norms messages had consistent impacts across the countries and studies, indicated by non-significant heterogeneity in effect sizes. Conversely, the endemic, safety, experts, efficacy and prosocial, and variant messages showed moderate-to-high between-study heterogeneity in effect sizes, with impacts varying across studies and countries. Still, none of our tested study-level moderators, including country-level vaccination rates, intervention start dates, and GDP per capita PPP, significantly explained the
paper leverages the data on nearly fifty (50) ports across East Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Southern/Eastern Africa. Herrera Dappe et al. (2017) further focused on countries and ports around the Indian Ocean.

> 37It also decomposed productivity changes into technological progress, pure efficiency, and scale efficiency. This decomposition is performed by the Malmquist Total Factor Productivity (TFP) Index a la Caves et al. (1982). Other papers, such as Suárez-Alemán et al. (2016), also use the Malmquist TFP Index to track and decompose sources of productivity gains over longer port-efficiency times series.

37
The second approach to dealing with consumption data which differ in their level of comprehensiveness is to predict unknown expenditure components. For example, suppose we have two time periods, _F_ and T, with food and food plus non-food expenditure data, respectively. A food share equation can be estimated using the data in period T. The estimated relationship between food and total expenditure can then be used to calculate a _predicted_ value of total expenditure for each household in period _F_ based on that household's food expenditure in time _F._ Finally a poverty measure based on predicted total expenditure for time period _F_ can be compared to one based on actual total expenditure in T. Using this approach, one can base comparisons on a common, price-adjusted, final poverty line, as is common practice, without recourse to food poverty lines (on price adjustments in this context see Datt, 1995, and Ravallion and Subramanian, 1996). The procedure would be more relevant when making a comparison of poverty between two time periods within a country, where the assumption of a stable set of demand functions is most tenable, rather than across countries.

Because the comprehensiveness of the data being compared across time periods or countries is, in principle, identical using this procedure, all poverty indicators may be used. However, in practice, caution is warranted. Households may deviate from the expenditure predicted for them based on the assumption that Engel's Law holds for the population as a whole. For example, a given household may purchase relatively little food given its income level. To the extent that this is true, welfare measures based on a small subset of expenditure components will be a poor proxy for true household welfare. In addition, all components of surveyed expenditure data are subject to measurement error. The quality of the welfare measure is likely to be particularly poor when the data are sparse. (These issues are discussed in detail in the following section.) Since FGT measures are more sensitive than the headcount to errors, the use of
Sadoff (2016)). To the extent that there are cross‐country differences in students’ intrinsic motivation when taking standardized tests, this will be conflated with the quality interpretation of the test scores. Student test scores also reflect the influence of the home environment. De Philippis and Rossi (2017) use US PISA data to study test scores of children attending the same school, but whose parents immigrated from different countries. Children of parents who immigrated from countries with high test scores also tend to do better on test scores themselves, holding constant the quality of education they received by focusing on children in the same schools.

# **A2.4  Returns to Education**

Values for the return to education parameter φ can be anchored in the vast empirical literature that estimates Mincer (1958)‐style regression of log wages on years of school. Returns to education naturally vary across levels of education, by gender, and across countries. However, in the interests of 34
bulk of the analysis, includes additional variables explaining growth. An overview of the alternative data is presented in Figure 7. Additional variables are the quality of capital, trade openness, terms of trade, and imported capital goods. This section also examines the effect of life expectancy as a companion indicator for human capital. In addition the role of military expenditures is analyzed, which, among others things, may serve as a proxy for bad governance in Guatemala. Section 6.4 closes with a brief summary of the findings.

## **6.1 Stability of Coefficients**

Given the distortions of the economy by the civil strife and other events, it is imperative to evaluate the stability of the coefficients. For example, comparing data

> 27 According to the Table, the implicit return to schooling can be calculated as follows: (0.034/0.240)/(1-0.240) ̃0.184. Discrepancies are due to rounding.

> 28 Based on ENCOVI (2000) survey data the World Bank (2003a) reports an overall rate of return of 6 percent.

-40-
better informed about constituents’ priorities, and are more likely to take actions aligned with those priorities. Improvements in the flow of policy-relevant information between officials and citizens translate into meaningful improvements in public service provision, visible in both administrative records and citizen reports of service access and quality, as well as village-level actions taken to improve local services. These gains reach even individuals who are socially distant from the village administration, and they are especially pronounced in villages where new leaders weaken entrenched nepotistic networks.

More broadly, our findings point to the importance of local accountability in shaping how democracy functions in practice. At a time when democratic institutions face growing skepticism in many settings, our results suggest that regular elections can help improve the quality of local governance by making bureaucracies more responsive and service delivery more effective. In that sense, the ability of elections to periodically shift power—even at very local levels—may be one important channel through which democracy delivers tangible benefits to citizens.

23
Policy Research Working Paper 10333

# **Abstract**

How do civil service management practices differ within and across governments? How do core attitudes of public servants—such as their motivation or satisfaction—differ within and across governments? Understanding how public administrations around the world function and differ is crucial for strengthening their effectiveness. Most comparative measures of bureaucracy rely on surveys of experts, households, or firms, rather than directly questioning bureaucrats. Direct surveys of public officials enable governments to benchmark themselves and scholars to study comparative public administration and the state differently, based on micro-data from actors who experience government first-hand. This paper introduces the Global Survey of Public Servants, a global initiative to collect and harmonize large-scale, comparable survey data on public servants. The Global Survey of Public Servants can help scholars compare public administrations around the world and understand the internal dynamics of governments, with the published Global Survey of Public Servants data freely available online.

This paper is a product of the Development Impact Evaluation Group, Development Economics and the Governance Global Practice. 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:// www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at drogger@worldbank.org and zhasnain@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
# Do Index Insurance Programs Live Up to Their Promises? Aggregating Evidence from Multiple Experiments<sup>_∗_</sup>

Pauline Castaing Jules Gazeaud

## **JEL Classification:** C11, G22, G52 , 012, 013, Q12.

**Keywords:** Index Insurance, Agricultural Decisions, External Validity, Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling

> _∗_ Pauline Castaing: The World Bank. E-mail: pcastaing@worldbank.org; Jules Gazeaud: J-PAL MENA, The American University in Cairo. E-mail: jgazeaud@povertyactionlab.org. We thank Frederick Amon-Armah, Catherine Araujo, Tanguy Bernard, Stefan Dercon, Esther Gehrke, Patrick Guillaumont, Alain de Janvry, Antoine Leblois, David McKenzie, Georgios Manalis, Rachael Meager, Muhammad Meki, Adam Osman, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Olivier Sterck, Quentin Stoeffler, Julie Subervie, Marteen Voors, Witold Wiecek, and conference, seminar, and workshop participants at CSAE, EUDN, GLaD, ICDE, J-PAL, and NOVAFRICA for helpful comments. We are grateful to all the authors who kindly agreed to share their data for this project: Erwin Bulte, Michael Carter, Francesco Cecchi, Shawn Cole, Ghada Elabed, Wouter Gelade, Xavier Giné, Catherine Guirkinger, Dean Karlan, Neha Kumar, Robert Lensink, Nicholas Magnan, Simrin Makhija, Ana Marr, Francesca de Nicola, Robert Osei, Isaac Osei-Akoto, David Spielman, Quentin Stoeffler, Christopher Udry, Marcel van Asseldonk, Ruth Vargas Hill, James Vickery and Patrick Ward. We are particularly indepted to Francesco Cecchi, Ghada Elabed, Sofia Gallo, Quentin Stoeffler, and Patrick Ward for helping us to understand the data, to Olivier Santoni for his help with the rainfall data, and to Rachael Meager and Witold Wiecek for developing the _baggr_ R package and for answering our questions. Viewpoints and errors are our own. Part of this research is based on work conducted while the authors were affiliated with CERDI, CNRS, Université Clermont Auvergne (Castaing and Gazeaud), and NOVAFRICA, Nova SBE
>3,380<br>Opinion on Culture*: Migrants bring new ideas and cultures (1= Strongly Agree)<br>3,383<br>Opinion on Crime*: Migrants increase crime (1= Strongly Agree)<br>3,377<br>Perception about Size: Venezuelans’ share of Colombian population<br>3,273<br>Perception about Education: Venezuelans’ average years of education<br>2,901<br>**Panel C. Covid 19 priming**<br>Did you lose your job because of the pandemic [1=Yes]<br>3,412<br>Colombian poverty has increased because of the pandemic* (1=Increased)<br>3,411<br>Pop.you know with COVID: No one<br>3,409<br>Pop.you know with COVID: 1-2<br>3,409<br>Pop.you know with COVID: 3-5<br>3,409<br>Pop.you know with COVID: 6-10<br>3,409<br>Pop.you know with COVID: More than 10<br>3,409<br>**Panel D. Listing Experiment and Social Desirability Index**<br>COVID-19 worst crisis that Colombia has faced in the last 50 years (1=Yes)<br>3,413<br>COVID-19 worst problem in last 10 years (3=Worst, 2= Second Worst , 1= Third Worst)<br>3,278<br>Social desirability index<br>3,376<br>_Notes:_ *We normalized these variables by dividing them on the maximum value to facilitate interpretation. _Altruis_<br>causes (ranges from one to 10, where 10 corresponds to “very willing to donate”); it was adapted fromFalk et al.(201<br>authors selected the
Table 10 Estimation of different pass-through rates using growth rate in national accounts measures and growth rates in household survey estimates available in PovcalNet

|||Poo<br>|led<br>|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|
|VARIABLES|All|No High Income|Lower Middle<br>Income|Consumption|Sub-Saharan<br>Africa|
|GDP<br>(growth rate)|0.869***|0.894***|0.693***|0.754***|0.715***|
||(0.0392)|(0.0503)|(0.0775)|(0.0579)|(0.169)|
|Observations|1,751|1,184|502|696|150|
|R-squared|0.219|0.210|0.138|0.196|0.107|
|||Compa|rable|||
||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|
|VARIABLES|Pooled|No High Income|Lower Middle<br>Income|Consumption|Sub-Saharan<br>Africa|
|GDP<br>(growth rate)|0.876***|0.911***|0.722***|0.756***|0.718***|
||(0.0384)|(0.0491)|(0.0772)|(0.0507)|(0.146)|
|Observations|1,403|933|391|525|150|
|R-squared|0.271|0.270
responses by plants? To answer the question, we notice that the two trade policy instruments generate different cost structures. From an importer’s perspective, PSI generates both a monetary and a likely larger non-monetary fixed cost per shipment, due to the increased risk of shipping delay. Rather than switching to domestic inputs, the uncertainty cost can be “smoothed” by an alternative strategy, i.e. importing less frequently larger quantities.

This strategy on the other hand, is not effective in reducing the cost increase of tariffs, as they generate monetary costs proportional to the quantity imported. The absence of an available smoothing strategy may make switching to domestic inputs a more likely choice, even at the expense of inputs’ quality.

To test this hypothesis, we turn to monthly customs’ data (see Appendix B.4 for details on the data). For each importer and year, we regress the (log) number of annual shipments and their (log) value on the share of imports exposed to PSI.<sup>26</sup> Customs data only provide information on the values of traded goods, but not additional information on the importer.<sup>27</sup> Therefore, we can only control for importer fixed effect and year fixed effect. The results - presented in Table 7 - are consistent with our hypothesis. In particular we find strong evidence that within a year, the application of PSI is associated with a lower number of shipments (column 1), but with shipment of higher value on average (column 2). For comparison, we report the impact of import tariffs as well. Unlike PSI, import tariffs on do not appear to significantly affect the frequency and value of shipment, although both coefficients are large and negative.

The strategy of importing higher value shipments less frequently should impact plants’ inventories of raw inputs, a hypothesis supported by the results in Table 8. The coefficient in column (1) suggests that PSI on inputs increases inventories.
While indirect taxes, as expected, increase the incidence of poverty when moving from disposable income to consumable income, the effect is not large enough to nullify the gains from direct transfers —and also from subsidies, which exhibit a positive marginal contribution to poverty (Figure 8)—, therefore placing the consumable income-based poverty still below the incidence measured with market income plus pensions: 1.8 percentage points (or 24 percent) below by using the $4/day poverty line; 1.9 points (or 27 percent) below by using the official extreme line; and half a point (or 3 percent) below by using the official moderate line.<sup>27</sup> Moreover, after the intervention of taxes, subsidies and direct transfers not only the incidence of poverty declines, but also the depth of poverty (intensity) and the magnitude of inequality among the poor (severity) fall remarkably (Figure 7.B).

**Figure 7: Effects of fiscal interventions on poverty**

<!-- Start of picture text --> A. Percentages of population in poverty, by income concept<br>18%<br>16% 17.0%<br>16.4%<br>15.9%<br>14%<br>12%<br>12.5%<br>10%<br>7.5% 7.7%<br>8%<br>5.7%<br>6% 6.9% 7.1%<br>4.4%<br>4% 5.0%<br>3.9%<br>2%<br>0%<br>Market Income plus pensions Net market income Disposable income Consumable income<br>$4/day poverty line Extreme poverty line (official) Moderate poverty line (official)<br>B. Percent changes in poverty indices from market
investment climate indicators, the significant ones are in accordance with the empirical findings in the literature. Better regulatory quality, quality of infrastructure, and protection of property rights lead to higher export sales whereas the inefficiencies in trade facilities decrease exports. The interaction terms between market access and IC indicators are significant with the expected signs in all specifications. This shows that improvements in investment climate would make larger contributions to increasing export performance of countries with low foreign market access relative to the ones with high foreign market access. The difficulties in access to foreign markets require higher levels of competitiveness and efficiency in exporters. Hence, the marginal contribution of improvements in investment climate to export revenues of these firms will be relatively larger than their contribution to firms in countries with easy access to foreign markets.

It is possible to measure the total impacts of the investment climate indicators on export performance. Using the estimation results from Table 6, I find total impacts of one standard deviation change in investment climate indicator on growth rates of export sales.<sup>10</sup> To show how countries with different levels of foreign market access benefit from this improvement, I compare 25<sup>th</sup> and 75<sup>th</sup> percentiles of foreign market access restrictiveness index which correspond to 2 and 5.5 percent tariff rates respectively.<sup>11</sup> The difference between growth rates of export sales generated by the change in each IC indicator for the two values of foreign market access index are given in Table 7. The table shows that a country in the 75<sup>th</sup> percentile of market access index distribution benefits from one standard deviation improvement of regulatory quality by 10 percentage points more than a country in the 25<sup>th</sup> percentile of the distribution. The impacts of the other IC indicators are of similar magnitudes. This finding shows that improvements in investment climate are important in reducing the barriers of trade and in leading to