rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Inflation Targeting in India : An
            Interim Assessment
This paper provides an assessment of
            India’s inflation-targeting regime. It shows that the
            Reserve Bank of India is best characterized as a flexible
            inflation targeter: contrary to criticism, it does not
            neglect changes in the output gap when setting policy rates.
            The paper does not find that the Reserve Bank of India
            became more hawkish following the transition to
            inflation-targeting; to the contrary, adjusting for
            inflation and the output gap, policy rates became lower, not
            higher. Some evidence suggests that inflation has become
            better anchored: increases in actual inflation do less to
            excite inflation expectations, indicative of improved
            anti-inflation credibility.  The question is whether the
            shift to inflation-targeting has enhanced the credibility of
            monetary policy such that the Reserve Bank of India is in a
            position to take extraordinary action in response to the
            Covid-19 crisis. The paper argues that the rules and
            understandings governing inflation-targeting regimes come
            with escape clauses allowing central banks to shelve their
            inflation targets temporarily, under specific circumstances
            satisfied by the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper provides
            evidence that inflation-targeting central banks were able to
            respond more forcefully to the Covid-19 crisis, consistent
            with the idea that inflation expectations were better
            anchored, providing more policy room for maneuver.
Child Care Markets, Parental Labor
            Supply, and Child Development
This paper develops and estimates a
            model of supply and demand for child care. On the demand
            side, one- and two-parent households make consumption, labor
            supply, and childcare decisions. On the supply side,
            non-parental care providers include child care centers, paid
            caregivers who operate at the child&#x2019;s home, and
            unpaid, informal care-givers. Centers make entry, price, and
            quality decisions under monopolistic competition. Child
            development is a function of the time spent with each parent
            and non-parental care providers; these inputs vary in
            impact. The model&#x2019;s structural parameters  are
            estimated using the 2003 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study,
            which contains information on parental employment and wages,
            child care choices, child development, and center quality.
            The model features locations that differ in size and median
            family income. Parameter estimates are used to evaluate
            multiple policies including vouchers, cash transfers, and
            public provision. Vouchers that can only be used in
            high-quality centers or that require mothers to work are
            particularly effective, as they deliver child development
            gains while increasing mothers&#x2019; labor supply,
            thereby limiting policies&#x2019; fiscal cost.
Credit Constraints and Fraud
            Victimization : Evidence from a Representative Chinese
            Household Survey
Using a novel, nationally representative
            data set on fraud victimization, this paper examines the
            impact of credit constraints on fraud victimization and
            potential underlying mechanisms in Chinese urban areas.
            After controlling for other household characteristics and
            regional fixed effects, households facing credit constraints
            are associated with 2.3 percentage points higher probability
            of becoming fraud victims, and have 20.4 percent higher
            subsequent economic losses from fraud when they are
            approached. The results are robust when dealing with the
            endogeneity of facing credit constraints and when addressing
            potential sample selection bias. Further analyses show that
            the personal discount rate (impatience) and the need for
            social network expansion are critical pathways via which
            credit constraints affect fraud victimization. The findings
            suggest that improving financial development is an effective
            way to reduce fraud victimization.
Socioeconomic Impacts of COVID-19 in
            Four African Countries
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
            and the attempts to limit its spread have resulted in
            profound economic impacts, and a significant contraction in
            the global economy is expected. This paper provides some of
            the first evidence on the socioeconomic impacts of and
            responses to the pandemic among households and individuals
            in Sub-Saharan Africa. To do so, reduced-form econometric
            methods are applied to longitudinal household survey data
            from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda -- originating
            from the pre-COVID-19 face-to-face household surveys and
            from the novel phone surveys that are being implemented
            during the pandemic. The headline findings are fourfold.
            First, although false beliefs about COVID-19 remain
            prevalent, government action to limit the spread of the
            disease is associated with greater individual knowledge of
            the disease and increased uptake of precautionary measures.
            Second, 256 million individuals -- 77 percent of the
            population in the four countries -- are estimated to live in
            households that have lost income due to the pandemic. Third,
            attempts to cope with this loss are exacerbated by the
            inability to access medicine and staple foods among 20 to 25
            percent of the households in each country, and food
            insecurity is disproportionately borne by households that
            were already impoverished prior to the pandemic. Fourth,
            student-teacher contact has dropped from a pre-COVID-19 rate
            of 96 percent to just 17 percent among households with
            school-age children. These findings can help inform
            decisions by governments and international organizations on
            measures to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic
            and reveal the need for continued monitoring.
The Interplay of Policy,
            Institutions, and Culture in the Time of Covid-19
Leveraging data in 147 countries  from
            the Johns Hopkins University, the World Bank, and other
            sources, we investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic spread and
            how the mortality rates are associated with preexisting
            vulnerabilities, the government’s mobility restriction
            policy, institutions (democracy), and culture (i.e., trust
            and individualistic culture). While delay in domestic
            mobility restrictions is not significantly associated with
            pandemic outcomes, increasing delay in restricting
            international mobility is associated with higher pandemic
            mortality rate. Some pre-existing vulnerabilities are
            positively associated with the spread of the pandemic but
            not the mortality rate. However, when vulnerabilities are
            accompanied with delay in domestic mobility restrictions,
            the pandemic has higher mortality. Democracy is associated
            with lower policy delay in restricting mobility, lower
            pandemic mortality rate, and features better protection of
            the vulnerable population from pandemic harms. However,
            delay in domestic mobility restrictions have more adverse
            effects in democratic countries. Trust is not associated
            with worse pandemic outcomes, but its combinations with
            policy delay and obesity are. More individualistic countries
            do not feature different pandemic outcomes. However, in such
            countries, government delay in domestic mobility
            restrictions is associated with significantly higher
            pandemic mortality rate, and the marginal effects of the
            share of elderly on pandemic spread is greater.
Do Cash Transfers Foster Resilience
            Evidence from Rural Niger
Policy makers are increasingly
            interested in strategies to promote resilience and mitigate
            the effects of future climatic shocks. Cash transfer
            programs have had widely documented positive welfare
            impacts. They often also aim to offer protection against
            shocks, but their role in fostering resilience has been less
            studied. This paper assesses whether the beneficiaries of a
            multiyear government cash transfer program in rural Niger
            are better able to mitigate the welfare effects of drought
            shocks. It analyzes mechanisms through which cash transfers
            contribute to resilience, such as savings facilitation,
            asset accumulation, or income smoothing in agriculture and
            off-farm activities. It combines household survey data
            collected as part of a randomized control trial with
            satellite data used to identify exogenous rainfall shocks.
            The results show that cash transfers increase household
            consumption by about 10 percent on average. Importantly,
            this increase is mostly concentrated among households
            affected by drought shocks, for whom welfare impacts are
            larger than transfer amounts. Cash transfers increase
            savings. They also help households protect earnings in
            agriculture and off-farm businesses when shocks occur. Few
            differences in household durables or livestock are observed.
            Overall, these findings suggest that cash transfer programs
            targeting poor households can foster resilience by
            facilitating savings and income smoothing.
Subsidies, Information, and the
            Timing of Children’s Health Care in Mali
Sustained progress in reducing child
            mortality requires better care for children who are acutely
            ill. This paper studies how health care subsidies and health
            workers providing information on symptoms affect the overuse
            and underuse of primary care, which depend not just on
            absolute levels of demand, but also on whether care is
            received when the child is actually sick. In a randomized
            controlled trial of 1,768 children in Mali, the study
            collected a unique panel of nine weeks of daily symptom and
            health care use data to study the impact of each policy on
            demand conditional on need for care, as defined by World
            Health Organization standards. Subsidies substantially
            increase care when it is medically indicated, while overuse
            remains rare. Health worker visits have no aggregate effect
            on demand, but they may help the youngest children take
            advantage of the subsidy.
Pandemic Trade : Covid-19, Remote
            Work and Global Value Chains
This paper studies the trade effects of
            Covid-19 using monthly disaggregated trade data for 28
            countries and multiple trading partners from the beginning
            of the pandemic to June 2020. Regression results based on a
            sector-level gravity model show that the negative trade
            effects induced by Covid-19 shocks varied widely across
            sectors.  Sectors more amenable to remote work contracted
            less throughout the pandemic. Importantly, participation in
            global value chains increased traders’ vulnerability to
            shocks suffered by trading partners, but it also reduced
            their vulnerability to domestic shocks.
Have Remittances Affected Real Unit
            Labor Costs in the Transition Economies of Eastern Europe,
            the South Caucasus, and Central Asia
Twelve of the 29 transition economies in
            Europe and Central Asia are high remittance recipients, with
            average remittance receipts equivalent to 5 percent or more
            of their gross domestic product in the 2010s. The paper
            examines the evolution, during the 2000s and 2010s, of real
            unit labor costs, denominated in local currency and U.S.
            dollars, of the transition economies. Local currency and
            U.S. dollar real unit labor costs rose much faster between
            2003 and 2015-17 in the high remittance recipient economies
            than in the other transition economies, although there was
            considerable variance between the countries in the high
            remittance recipient group. Among the high remittance
            recipients, approximately half of the increase in real unit
            labor costs denominated in U.S. dollars can be attributed to
            increases in local currency real unit labor costs and half
            to appreciation of their real exchange rates. Fixed effects
            and cross-country econometric estimates suggest that
            remittances had a positive and significant impact on the
            changes in domestic currency real unit labor costs in the
            transition economies.
Using Mobile Data to Understand
            Urban Mobility Patterns in Freetown, Sierra Leone
In recent years, researchers have
            demonstrated that digital footprints from mobile phones can
            be exploited to generate data that are useful for transport
            planning, disaster response, and other development
            activities—thanks mainly to the high penetration rate of
            mobile phones even in low-income regions. Most recently, in
            the effort to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, these data
            can be used and explored to track mobility patterns and
            monitor the results of lockdown measures. However, as
            rightly noted by other scholars, most of the work has been
            limited to proofs of concept or academic work: it is hard to
            point to any real-world use cases. In contrast, this paper
            uses mobile data to obtain insight on urban mobility
            patterns, such as number of trips, average trip length, and
            relation between poverty, mobility, and areas of Freetown,
            the capital of Sierra Leone. These data were used in
            preparation of an urban mobility lending operation.
            Additionally, the paper describes good practices in the
            following areas: accessing mobile data from telecom
            operators, frameworks for generating origin and destination
            matrices, and validation of results.
Investment Impacts of Gendered Land
            Rights in Customary Tenure Systems : Substantive and
            Methodological Insights from Malawi
Compared with the vast literature on the
            investment and productivity effects of land rights
            formalization, little attention has been paid to the impact
            of variation in individuals’ tenure security under customary
            tenure regimes. This is a serious gap not only because most
            of Africa’s rural land is held under informal arrangements,
            but also because gradual erosion of long-term rights by
            women and migrants is often an indication of traditional
            systems coming under stress. Using a unique survey
            experiment in Malawi, the analysis shows that (i) having
            long-term land rights of bequest and sale has a significant
            impact on investment and cash crop adoption; (ii) women’s
            land rights of bequest and sale, joint with local
            institutional arrangements, can amplify the magnitude of
            such effects; and (iii) the effects found here can be
            obscured by measurement error associated with traditional
            approaches to survey data collection on land ownership and rights.
Macroeconomic Expectations and
            Credit Card Spending
How do macroeconomic expectations affect
            consumer decisions? This paper reports results from a
            natural field experiment with 2,872 credit card customers
            from a large commercial bank to answer this question.
            Participants of the experiment first completed as survey
            that measured consumer expectations about future inflation
            and the nominal exchange rate. This survey was combined with
            an information-provision experiment that generated exogenous
            variation in respondents’ macroeconomic expectations. The
            survey and experimental data were then merged with detailed
            administrative data on participants’ credit card
            transactions and balances. The experiment was designed to
            test three standard predictions from models of intertemporal
            consumption choice: inflation expectations should affect
            spending on durables; exchange rate expectations should
            affect spending on tradables; and, holding constant the
            nominal interest rate, inflation expectations should affect
            borrowing. The analysis finds that the information provided
            to participants strongly affects subjective expectations.
            However, no significant effects are found on actual consumer
            behavior (as measured in administrative data) or
            self-reported consumption plans (as measured in survey
            data). The preferred interpretation is that consumers are
            not sophisticated enough to factor inflation and exchange
            rate expectations into their consumption decisions. The
            absence of a link between consumer expectations and behavior
            has potentially important implications for macroeconomic
            policies such as forward guidance.
Tax-Transfers Schemes, Informality,
            and Search Frictions in a Small Open Economy
This paper evaluates the impact of
            market-oriented structural reforms, in particular labor
            market policies, social assistance programs, and trade
            liberalization on long run unemployment, wage inequality,
            and the distribution of employment across sectors in a small
            open economy with search frictions and idiosyncratic
            productivity shocks. The paper builds a search and matching
            model of a labor market with a large informal sector and
            estimates the model using Colombian household-level data.
            Changes in labor taxes may have sizable aggregate,
            compositional, and distributional effects if workers
            associate high payroll taxes with more valuable and
            efficient social security services. The higher is the
            valuation of the services, the higher is the reduction in
            the log-wage gap. An expansion of public health insurance to
            informal sector workers has minor aggregate and
            distributional effects. Changes in relative prices that
            negatively affect the relative profitability of the formal
            sector have quite sizable aggregate effects, producing more
            long-run unemployment and informality, and increasing
            unemployment duration.
Growth, Inequality, and Poverty : A
            Robust Relationship
An extensive literature on poverty traps
            suggests that high levels of poverty deter growth. However,
            a seemingly basic implication of the underlying theoretical
            models, namely that countries suffering from higher levels
            of poverty should grow less rapidly, has remained untested.
            A parallel literature has suggested a variety of mechanisms
            through which inequality may affect growth in opposing
            directions. Because inequality and poverty are different
            aspects of the income distribution, inequality can also
            affect growth through poverty, an indirect channel that has
            not been explicitly analyzed. This paper contributes to fill
            both gaps. Using a large cross-country panel data set, it
            estimates a reduced-form growth equation adding both
            inequality and poverty to an otherwise standard set of
            growth determinants. Given inequality, the correlation of
            growth with poverty is consistently negative. In contrast,
            given poverty, the correlation of growth with inequality can
            be positive or negative, depending on the empirical
            specification and econometric approach used. Yet, the
            indirect effect of inequality on growth through its
            correlation with poverty is robustly negative. Closer
            inspection shows that these results are driven by the sample
            observations featuring high (but not extremely high) poverty
            rates. These empirical findings are consistent with the
            predictions from an analytical framework with
            learning-by-doing and knowledge spillovers, in which
            consumers cannot save and invest if their initial endowment
            is below a minimum consumption level.
The Distributional Impacts of
            Cigarette Taxation in Bangladesh
Despite the obvious positive health
            impacts of tobacco taxation, an argument raised against it
            is that poor households bear the burden of the increased
            prices because of their higher share of spending on tobacco.
            This note includes estimates of the distributional impacts
            of price rises on cigarettes under various scenarios using
            the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2016/17. One
            contribution of this analysis is to quantify the impacts by
            allowing price elasticities to vary across consumption
            deciles. This shows that an increase in the price of
            cigarettes in Bangladesh has small consumption impacts and
            does not significantly change the poverty rate or
            consumption inequality. These findings stem from relatively
            even cigarette consumption patterns between less and more
            well-off households. These results hold even considering
            some small substitution through the use of bidis, which are
            largely consumed by the poor. The short-term consumption
            impacts are also negligible compared with the estimated
            gains because of savings in medical costs and the greater
            number of productive years of life.