rafmacalaba/data-use-mentions-extended huggingface dataset:
schools at the district level and act as conduit of funds and grants from the center. The funds flow from the Ministry of Finance (MoF) to schools through the MoE, DoE, and DEOs. Each school has an elected School Management Committee (SMC) that manages day-to-day operation and makes budgetary allocations.<sup>3</sup> Teacher salaries, textbooks, scholarships, and construction expenditure constitute more than 90 percent of the budget on basic education (grades 1 – 8) (Thapa, 2011; The World Bank, 2014).

Education access has expanded and outcomes have improved significantly in the past decades in Nepal. Between 1999 and 2015, the primary net enrollment rate increased from 66 percent to 97 percent and the proportion of out-of-school children of primary school age dropped from 34 percent to 3 percent. Over the same period, the primary completion rate went from 64 percent to 105 percent (World Development Indicators; The World Bank, 2014)<sup>4</sup> . Gender parity has been attained up to the secondary level and disparities in access to schooling across geographical areas, income groups, and ethnicity and caste groups have also been eliminated or substantially reduced compared to a few decades ago.

Despite the progress in schooling access and outcomes, however, quality of education remains low. A national assessment of grade 10 students in 2011 showed poor performance of students in the core subjects, with particularly low scores in Nepali (33 percent) and Mathematics (37 percent) (Educational and Developmental Service Centre, 2011).

Liberal promotion policy was introduced late 1990s in response to the high degree of inefficiency in the system. While the primary net enrollment ratio in 1999 was 66, the gross enrollment ratio was 117 due to high repetition rates. It was estimated that the system had to deliver 11.4 years of schooling to complete five years of primary education (The World Bank, 1999). To improve efficiency at the primary level, the Government of Nepal introduced the twin
> 2 The Doing Business indicators were developed from collaborations with academics (e.g. Djankov, La Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes and Shleifer, 2002; Djankov, La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes and Shleifer, 2003; Botero,  Djankov, La Porta, Lopez de Silanes and Shleifer 2004; Djankov, Simeon,  Caralee McLiesh, and Andrei Shleifer 2007.). The DB data, once developed, has then been used to examine the effect of labor regulations (Micco and Pages 2006;), regulation of entry (Bruhn, forthcoming; Klapper, Laeven and Rajan. 2006), or a wide set of regulations (Loayza, Oviedo and Servén, 2006; Bolaky and Freund 2008; Eifert 2009) on cross-country outcomes of interest.

2
level. Existing research either focuses on detailed evidence from individual countries (Tiepolo & Galligari, 2021) or select world regions (Henderson _et al._ , 2017) or it links climate change to urbanization statistics aggregated at the country level (Castells-Quintana _et al._ , 2021; Maurel & Tuccio, 2016). Invaluable as the insights from existing studies are, they struggle to simultaneously account for subnational variation in both climate and urbanization and establish larger regional and global patterns that are likely at play.

In this paper, we assess the nexus between climate change and growing cities at a global level, exploiting a novel panel dataset that covers every country in the world between 1985 and 2014. We operationalize our variables utilizing the PRIO-GRID v2.0 cell structure that divides the entire globe into 0.5° _×_ 0.5°cells (Tollefsen _et al._ , 2012). Our independent variable is the proportion of months out of 12 months that are part of the longest streak of consecutive months ending in a given year that experienced drought. Our main dependent variable is the annual increment in built-up pixels within each PRIO-GRID cell as captured by the World Settlement Footprint database (Marconcini _et al._ , 2020). This remotely sensed and fine-grained data allows us to understand exactly where cities are growing rather than defaulting to aggregate urbanization statistics. We examine the link between drought and built-up area using multiple spatially and temporally lagged versions of our independent variable, more accurately modeling the processes by which unpropitious climatic conditions impact growing cities. Our models control for numerous potential confounders of the relationship between climatic conditions and migration, such as distance to international borders and the area covered by land in each grid cell.

We find a robust positive relationship between drought and urban expansion. Our results indicate that if an entire year were spent under drought conditions, nearby cities would experience a 27 percent increase in _newly_ built-up area. In other words, drought in regions that surround urban centers accelerates the rate at which cities expand
- Donato, Katharine M, and Elizabeth Ferris. 2020. “Refugee integration in Canada, Europe, and the United States: perspectives from research.” _The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_ 690 (1): 7–35.

- Dustmann, Christian, and Joseph-Simon Görlach. 2016. “Estimating immigrant earnings profiles when migrations are temporary.” _Labour Economics_ 41:1–8.

- Edin, Per-Anders, Peter Fredriksson, and Olof Åslund. 2003. “Ethnic enclaves and the economic success of immigrants—Evidence from a natural experiment.” _Quarterly Journal of Economics_ 118 (1): 329–357.

- European Commission. 2016. _Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL establishing a Union Resettlement Framework and amending Regulation (EU) No 516/2014 of the European Parliament and the Council._ arXiv: arXiv:1011.1669v3.

- Fasani, Francesco, Tommaso Frattini, and Luigi Minale. 2020a. _(The Struggle for) Refugee Integration into the Labour Market: Evidence from Europe._ CEPR Discussion Papers 12718. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research.

- ~~.~~ 2020b. _Lift the Ban? Initial Employment Restrictions and Refugee Labour Market Outcomes._

- CEPR Discussion Papers 14765. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research.

- Hainmueller, Jens, Dominik Hangartner, and Duncan Lawrence. 2016. “When lives are put on hold: Lengthy asylum processes decrease employment among refugees.” _Science Advances_ 2 (8): e1600432.

- Hangartner, Dominik, Lukas Schmid, Dalston Ward, and Stefan Boes. 2020. “Which Political Activities Are Caused by Education? Evidence from School Entry Exams.” _Evidence from School Entry Exams (October 9, 2020)._

- Jaschke, Philipp, Sulin Sardoschau, and Marco Tabellini. 2020. “Do refugees converge to local culture? Evidence from German regions.” Available here: https://cerdi.uca.fr/medias/
# **ICT Use, Innovation, and Productivity: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa**

## **1. Introduction**

Low productivity growth is one of the main factors hindering economic growth in many developing economies, especially in Sub-Saharan African. One potential enabler of productivity growth is the adoption and use of information, communication and technology (ICT). ICT can facilitate productivity growth by making use of production factors more efficiently and facilitating the adoption of other technologies. The potential for ICT as a productivity enabler is even larger in those regions farthest away from the technological frontier, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, which until now tended to have lower ICT adoption rates and underdeveloped ICT infrastructure.

The extent of the contribution of ICT towards economic growth is still under debate; even when this issue is investigated using data from the developed world. The early empirical literature in the 1970s and 1980s measuring whether the significant implementation of ICT as a new technological revolution had an impact on productivity growth found inconclusive evidence; coined as the “productivity paradox” or “Solow Paradox”.<sup>2</sup> Pilat (2004) suggested several factors that contributed to the “productivity paradox” including the limited capability of aggregate data (at country and/or sector level) to measure properly the impact of ICT on productivity growth.<sup>3</sup> This debate still continues today and it remains an open question about the extent to which ICT can boost productivity growth.<sup>4</sup> Despite the existing caveats, some literature reviews such as Pilat (2004), Draca et al (2006) and Litan and Rivlin (2001) suggest a positive effect of ICT on productivity growth; although there is some evidence of publication bias in the literature that could overemphasize this positive impact of ICT on productivity. According to Polak (2014), the average estimated ICT elasticity is positive but very small, 0.3%. One possible explanation for this small impact could be the
Luo, Hanqi, Sarah J. Zyba, and Patrick Webb. 2020. “Measuring Malnutrition in All Its Forms: An Update of the Net State of Nutrition Index to Track the Global Burden of Malnutrition at Country Level.” _Global Food Security_ 26 (September): 100453. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2020.100453.

Machado, Ísis Eloah, Magda Do Carmo Parajára, Larissa Fernanda Fonseca Guedes, Adriana Lúcia Meireles, Mariana Carvalho de Menezes, Mariana Santos Felisbino-Mendes, Eliseu Verly-Junior, and Deborah Carvalho Malta. 2022. “Burden of Non-Communicable Diseases Attributable to Dietary Risks in Brazil, 1990-2019: An Analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019.” _Revista Da Sociedade Brasileira de Medicina Tropical_ 55. https://doi.org/10.1590/0037-8682-0282-2021.

Mahumud, Rashidul Alam, Berhe W. Sahle, Ebenezer Owusu-Addo, Wen Chen, Rachael Lisa Morton, and Andre M.N. Renzaho. 2021. “Association of Dietary Intake, Physical Activity, and Sedentary Behaviours with Overweight and Obesity among 282,213 Adolescents in 89 Low and Middle Income to High-Income Countries.” _International Journal of Obesity 2021 45:11_ 45 (11): 2404–18. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41366-021-00908-0.

Marcus, Hannah, Claudia Schauer, and Stanley Zlotkin. 2021. “Effect of Anemia on Work Productivity in Both Labor- and Nonlabor-Intensive Occupations: A Systematic Narrative Synthesis.” _Food and Nutrition Bulletin_ 42 (2): 289–308.

https://doi.org/10.1177/03795721211006658/ASSET/IMAGES/LARGE/10.1177_03795721211006658FIG2.JPEG.

Martin-Prevel, Yves, Mary Arimond, Pauline Allemand, Doris Wiesmann, Terri J. Ballard, Megan Deitchler, Marie Claude Dop, et al. 2017. “Development of a Dichotomous Indicator for Population-Level Assessment of Dietary Diversity in Women of Reproductive Age.” _Current Developments in Nutrition_ 1 (12)
# **Introduction**

COVID-19 school closures led to emergency remote-learning systems almost immediately. At its peak, nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries, or 94 percent of the world’s student population, were impacted by school closures (UNESCO 2020). Students learned less when they were remote and attending high-poverty schools, which were hit hardest (Engzell et al. 2021). Learning losses could cost this generation of students close to $15 trillion in lifetime earnings (Psacharopoulos et al. 2021). Worldwide, learning losses on average amount to 0.17 of a standard deviation (Patrinos et al. 2023), equivalent to roughly a one-half year’s worth of learning.

I estimate the impact of the duration of school closures on learning. The longer the duration of the closures, then the greater the losses. For countries with robust learning loss data, average school closures were 21 weeks, leading to average losses of 0.23 standard deviation, almost a whole year’s worth of learning. Each week of closures increases learning loss by 1 percent of a standard deviation. This will increase the education gaps between high and low socioeconomic status students (Agostinelli et al. 2022), especially in lower-income countries (Kaffenberger 2021). The main lesson learned is that if COVID continues as a low-intensity pandemic, or if a similar situation arises, keeping schools open should be a priority, as the evidence shows that the health benefits of school closures seemed to have been lower than the cost of learning losses (Allen 2022; Davies et al. 2021, 2020; Gandini et al. 2021; Lee and Raszka 2020; Ludvigsson 2020; Raffetti and Baldassarre 2022). The priority now should be to minimize the long-term impacts of school closures.

This paper contributes to several strands of the literature. First, it adds to the growing research on the impact of school closures on learning outcomes (Agostinelli et al. 2022; Belot and Webbink 2010; Haelermans et al
access to publicly provided services across city sizes. Section 6 looks at differences in poverty (and inequality) within specific cities in Morocco, focusing in particular on poverty and inequality differences between slums and non-slum areas in larger towns. Section 7 subjects our findings to some robustness checks. We first look to data from Brazil for evidence of spatial price variation across city-sizes. A second robustness check is applied to the case of Mexico, to examine whether an alternative dimension of deprivation, namely child malnutrition, exhibits the same gradient across city size categories as income poverty. In a final robustness check we show that, in India,
formalization of remittances partly explains the increase in recorded remittances observed in several developing countries during the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic. This stemmed from a prohibitive increase in the costs of sending informal remittances due to mobility restrictions imposed to control contagion. We use subnational data from a developing country, Mexico, to show that the increase in formal remittances was driven by municipalities closer to a US border crossing that had been more likely to receive informal remittances before March 2020. Consistent with this hypothesis, these areas also experienced a disproportionate increase in transaction bank accounts during this period. These accounts were probably opened in order to receive formal remittances via electronic transfer that would have come through informal channels prior to the pandemic.

> 22On January 31, 2020, the White House 2019 Novel Coronavirus Task Force announced the implementation of new travel policies effective on February 2, 2020. For a detailed timeline of the different events since December 2019, see the CDC museum timeline in the following website.

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# **5. CONCLUSIONS**

**A stylized fact emerging in the recent empirical literature is the increase in average levels of market power across countries, in both developed and emerging economies. This paper aims to bring new evidence about the evolution of corporate market power in Romania and the implications for competition dynamics.** It uses markups as a proxy for market power and explores firm-level heterogeneity to identify the underlying drivers of aggregate trends. The paper applies the production approach—following De Loecker and Warzynski (2012); De Loecker and Eeckhout (2018); and De Loecker, Eeckhout, and Unger (2020)—to estimate markup at the firm-year level for Romania. The Romanian Structural Business Survey data set is used to apply this methodology.

**Results show that the aggregate markup in Romania increased by around 15 percent between 2008 and 2017. However, this aggregate performance masks a lot of heterogeneity, the first being heterogeneity of markups across the main sectors.** While in manufacturing, (sales-weighted) average markups experienced a declining pattern of −5.7 percent during 2008–17, there was an opposite, and much more rapid, trend in services, with an aggregate change of 42.2 percent.

**Second, at the firm level, results suggest that a key driving force behind this aggregate trend was the ability of the top decile of firms in the markup distribution to increase their markups.** This increase has been faster than for the rest of the firms. Firms in the 90th percentile of the markup distribution increased their (sales-weighted) average markup by 28.5 percent between 2008 and 2017, while the rest of firms (that is, those below the top decile firms) experienced a completely opposite trend: their weighted markup contracted by 8.3 percent over the same period.

**This sample of top decile firms does not seem to follow the typical superstar firms’ profile, which suggests that the increase in markups in Romania might be associated
Figure 8: Distribution of share of local suppliers, by population size <!-- Start of picture text --> 0.25<br>80<br>60<br>40<br>20<br>0<br>0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7<br>Share of same-municipality suppliers<br> (Population above median)<br>0.18<br>120<br>100<br>80<br>60<br>40<br>20<br>0<br>0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7<br>Share of same-municipality suppliers<br> (Population below median)<br>Frequency<br>Frequency<br><!-- End of picture text -->

**Notes:** This figure presents the distribution of the percentage of firms located within the same municipality where the tender process occurs, regardless of whether it is a headquarters or a branch. The distribution is disaggregated by municipalities above and below the median population of 2018. Data is drawn from the tender-participant table and includes only suppliers who won the tender process and whose identifier has 14 digits. We match this data with the _Cadastro Nacional de Pessoas Jurídicas_ (CNPJ), a dataset provided by the Ministry of the Economy that contains information on every firm registered in Brazil. Red dotted line marks the average value of the distribution. The temporal coverage of the data ranges from 2014 to 2021. See Table 1 for more details.

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**a. Change in the likelihood of receiving benefits by consumption deciles of 2005**

<!-- Start of picture text --> Rural areas Urban areas<br>1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10<br>Consumption decile in 2005 Consumption decile in 2005<br>95% confidence intervals 95% confidence intervals<br>40 40<br>30 30<br>20 20<br>10 10<br>Change in the likelihood of receiving benefits<br>0 0<br><!-- End of picture text --> Source: IHDS, 2005 and 2012

# _4.3. Vulnerability_

Although poverty has fallen, the mean income (658 rupees) and median income (516 rupees) for 2005 are very close to the poverty line (446 rupees). This raises the question: how vulnerable are those escaping poverty to the risk of falling into poverty? To identify the vulnerable population we use a threshold that comes from Dang and Lanjouw (2015), who define a vulnerability threshold of 760 rupees (expressed in 2004-05 All India Rural Rupees) for India. By constructing synthetic panels using NSS data, they derive this threshold as one that yields a probability of 20 percent of falling into poverty conditional on household and demographic characteristics over the seven year period.<sup>23</sup> In our data, this threshold lies around the 76<sup>th</sup> percentile of consumption per-capita.

We plot the poverty line and the threshold on the kernel estimates of the distributions of consumption per-capita for 2005 and 2012 (Figure 10). As the poverty rate has fallen, the percentage of vulnerable individuals (those between the poverty line and vulnerability threshold) has increased slightly, from 36 percent to 38 percent. Of those who climbed out of poverty between 2005 and 2012, 64 percent remained below the vulnerability threshold; and among those who remained
||
|Age|No|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Firm size|No|No|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Share of white-collar workers|No|No|No|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Capital/worker|No|No|No|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Exports/sales|No|No|No|No|Yes|Yes|
|FDI share|No|No|No|No|Yes|Yes|
|Time efects|No|No|No|No|No|Yes|
|Observations|1402|1402|1402|1402|1402|1402|

Robust standard errors in parentheses * Significant at the 1% level, **Significant at the 5% level, *** Significant at the 1% level All specifications include firm’s fixed effects. Source: Authors’ calculations using data from ENTIC, INEGI 18
three main theoretical models used in WELCOM to simulate alternative market conditions: (a) the monopolistic structure, (b) the oligopolistic structure (Nash equilibrium), and (c) the PCO structure. These models are the theoretical foundations of the simulation method presented and implemented in the following sections.

# **2.1. Theoretical model**

Stigler (1964) and Dixit and Stern (1982) are among the authors of the first theoretical papers studying the distributional effects of market concentration. The seminal paper by Stigler (1964) proposes a model that focuses on the factors that influence oligopolistic behavior in determining prices above the market threshold. To test empirically his theories on the positive relationship between market concentration and prices, Stigler (1964) started the trend of using the Herfindahl-Hirschman index in econometric analysis. He found that small buyers are more likely to pay higher prices under market concentration than bigger buyers and that buyer diversity ultimately fosters competition. Dixit and Stern (1982) developed an oligopolistic market framework that supported the empirical assessment of welfare under imperfect market conditions. They explored welfare losses in a specific industry with a homogenous good and a small number of firms and noted several distributional issues associated with this framework. For example, if a dollar gain to consumers is perceived as more valuable than a dollar

> 11 The impacts on welfare are not linear. The aggregate effect is thus not necessarily equal to the sum of the individual impacts.

4
higher rate, or converting reorganization cases into liquidations at a lower rate. Then they show that employees of insolvent rms whose cases were assigned to a high-pro-labor court are more likely to stay with the same employer in the post-bankruptcy period. Finally, the authors try to understand why do employees remain with the same employer when they could potentially earn more if searching for a new job. They nd that the relative decline in earnings is stronger in areas with limited internet coverage. Their interpretation of this result is that when information costs are high, individuals limit their search and are more likely to stay with their current employer for longer, even if this implies a wage reduction. Overall, their empirical ndings suggest that judicial bias matters for employees' earnings and employment trajectories in Brazil and have important policy implication for the role of bankruptcy institutions. This is consistent with the results of Ponticelli and Alencar (2016) and their implication that an ecient judiciary is an important precondition for rms to benet from these reforms.

# 5.2.4 Financial deepening

Catão et al. (2009) examine empirically a link between credit markets and formalization. Since access to bank credit typically requires compliance with tax and employment legislation, rms are more likely to incur such formalization costs once bank credit is more widely available at lower cost. Since the cost of remaining an unregistered rm is that of having either limited or no access to formal credit markets, nancial deepening would tend to shrink the relative size of the informal sector. They exploit the fact that in the 2000s Brazil experienced both a sizable credit expansion and a large decline in labor informality. The share of workers with a formal labor contract (carteira assinada) rose from 38 percent in 2003 to nearly 45 percent of the urban labor force by early 2008. They note that this upward trend in formality took place with a simultaneous credit expansion. The ratio of credit to rms rose from 15 percent of GDP in 2003 to 22 percent in 2008. They investigate this credit channel for