rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
What do teachers know and do does it
            matter evidence from primary schools in Africa
School enrollment has universally
            increased over the past 25 years in low-income countries.
            However, enrolling in school does not guarantee that
            children learn. A large share of children in low-income
            countries learn little, and they complete their primary
            education lacking even basic reading, writing, and
            arithmetic skills—the so-called "learning crisis."
            This paper uses data from nationally representative surveys
            from seven Sub-Saharan African countries, representing close
            to 40 percent of the region's total population, to
            investigate possible answers to this policy failure by
            quantifying teacher effort, knowledge, and skills. Averaging
            across countries, the paper finds that students receive two
            hours and fifty minutes of teaching per day—or just over
            half the scheduled time. In addition, large shares of
            teachers do not master the curricula of the students they
            are teaching; basic pedagogical knowledge is low; and the
            use of good teaching practices is rare. Exploiting
            within-student, within-teacher variation, the analysis finds
            significant and large positive effects of teacher content
            and pedagogical knowledge on student achievement. These
            findings point to an urgent need for improvements in
            education service delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa. They also
            provide a lens through which the growing experimental and
            quasi-experimental literature on education in low-income
            countries can be interpreted and understood, and point to
            important gaps in knowledge, with implications for future
            research and policy design.
Personality traits, technology
            adoption, and technical efficiency : evidence from
            smallholder rice farms in Ghana
Although a large literature highlights
            the impact of personality traits on key labor market
            outcomes, evidence of their impact on agricultural
            production decisions remains limited. Data from 1,200
            Ghanaian rice farmers suggest that noncognitive skills
            (polychronicity, work centrality, and optimism)
            significantly affect simple adoption decisions, returns from
            adoption, and technical efficiency in rice production, and
            that the size of the estimated impacts exceeds that of
            traditional human capital measures. Greater focus on
            personality traits relative to cognitive skills may help
            accelerate innovation diffusion in the short term, and help
            farmers to respond flexibly to new opportunities and risks
            in the longer term.
The global role of the U.S. economy:
            linkages, policies and spillovers
This paper analyzes the role of the
            United States in the global economy and examines the extent
            of global spillovers from changes in U.S. growth, monetary
            and fiscal policies, and uncertainty in its financial
            markets and economic policies. Developments in the U.S.
            economy, the world's largest, have effects far beyond
            its shores. A surge in U.S. growth could provide a
            significant boost to the global economy. Tightening U.S.
            financial conditions -- whether due to contractionary U.S.
            monetary policy or other reasons -- could reverberate across
            global financial markets, with adverse effects on some
            emerging market and developing economies that rely heavily
            on external financing. In addition, lingering uncertainty
            about the course of U.S. economic policy could have an
            appreciably negative effect on global growth prospects.
            While the United States plays a critical role in the world
            economy, activity in the rest of the world is also important
            for the United States.
Push and pull : a study of
            international migration from Nepal
This paper studies migration choices in
            the presence of liquidity constraints and varying costs of
            migration. This paper presents a simple theoretical
            framework that analyzes migration response to both push and
            pull factors in such settings. This framework implies that a
            shock to the push factors in the origin leads to
            differential observed response to migration to various
            destinations, as the shocks affect different parts of the
            wealth distribution. The implications of this framework are
            tested in the context of international migration from Nepal,
            using a panel of 452 villages observed at three periods in
            the 2000s. The analysis uses rainfall shocks and deaths due
            to conflict as "push" shocks and growth in
            manufacturing and construction in destination countries as
            "pull" shocks. The findings show that a rainfall
            shock that increases household income by US$ 100 increases
            migration to India by 54 percent but has no effect on
            migration elsewhere. An increase in conflict, which reduces
            consumption and amenity of the wealthier more, increases
            migration abroad, especially from urban areas. An increase
            in demand from the destination countries, especially the
            Gulf countries and Malaysia, has strong effects on migration
            to those destinations. These findings are consistent with
            the theoretical framework, and suggest the presence of large
            liquidity constraints. An increase in income can boost
            migration to India, whereas a reduction in the cost of
            migration might increase profitable migration elsewhere. The
            responsiveness to "pull" shocks suggests that
            households are willing to take advantage of these opportunities.
Recovery from conflict : lessons of success
This paper studies long-term impacts of
            violent conflict, to provide insights into the costs of
            conflict and policies to prevent conflict relapse. The
            findings link evidence on the contemporaneous effects of
            conflict with its persistent impact, especially by combining
            multiple data sources such as night lights, indicators of
            political exclusion, and nutrition. There is a strong level
            effect on output arising from the intensity of conflict,
            which, contrary to perceptions of post-conflict booms, on
            average is not reversed by subsequent more rapid growth. The
            paper investigates two possible channels that make conflict
            persistent: refugee flows and investment. Both channels
            display wide variation across recovery episodes, and are
            capable of large surges, which can in some cases generate
            rapid recoveries. Where recoveries lack buoyancy --which is
            the case for many post-conflict episodes -- deeper political
            constraints appear to be at work, which may ultimately
            relate to the effectiveness of power sharing. Finally, to
            highlight the need for more effective policies and knowledge
            in this area, the paper shows that the human development
            costs of conflict are huge, and can persist through a full
            generation. Policy recommendations and pointers for future
            research form the conclusion.
Agent banking in a highly
            under-developed financial sector : evidence from the
            Democratic Republic of Congo
The paper provides evidence on the
            number and volume of financial transactions undertaken by
            agents (local businesses that double as more convenient,
            lower cost alternatives to formal branches) of the largest
            microfinance institution operating in the Democratic
            Republic of Congo. More important than agents’ personal
            characteristics, transactions are higher in low-income,
            densely populated areas with high levels of commercial
            development. This finding suggests that the agent network
            has been best at supporting financial transactions among the
            urban poor. In addition, branding and effective liquidity
            management are strongly linked to agent activity.
Seasonality of rural finance
Simultaneity of borrowing, withdrawal of
            savings, and loan defaults due to the pronounced seasonality
            of ag-riculture often leads to investment failure of rural
            financial institutions. Lack of borrowing leads to lack of
            in-come- and consumption-smoothing, and in turn, causes
            inefficient resource allocation by rural households.
            Financial institutions that are active in rural areas take
            different measures to address the covariate risks in
            in-termediation. For example, microfinance institutions have
            sought various measures such as supporting non-farm
            activities to diversify income, introducing seasonal loans,
            and bringing flexibility in loan repayments to reduce
            non-payments in lean seasons.  This paper examines whether
            the financial inclusion policies of micro-finance
            institutions have successfully helped reduce the adverse
            effects of covariate risks. Analysis of house-hold and
            program level data from Bangladesh suggests that despite the
            innovative measures taken by the MFIs to cope with the
            covariate risks, seasonality of income still affects
            seasonality of borrowing and invest-ment decisions of both
            the households and MFIs beyond and above what is caused
            normally by agricultural seasonality. Innovation is needed
            to promote, among other things, sectoral diversification of
            financial inter-mediation and to avert the extreme
            seasonality of rural income. Rural labor markets should be
            diversified enough to address the seasonality of income and
            consumption.  Public policies guiding rural financial
            inter-mediation must reflect such realities of rural economies.
Brexit : trade governance and legal
            implications for third countries
While precise impact of Brexit on the
            EU/UK trade and investment agreements with third countries
            will depend primarily on the terms of the withdrawal
            agreement to be concluded between them, most scenarios
            suggest an extensive process of amendment of the text and/or
            commitments in multilateral and bilateral agreements. At the
            multilateral level, the UK will remain a WTO Member, but
            will no longer be represented by the EU. The separation of
            the UK obligations from the current EU lists of concessions
            and schedules of commitments will require amendments that,
            particularly regarding subsidies and quotas, may lead to a
            broader renegotiation process requiring consensus of all
            interested WTO members. At the bilateral level, the status
            of current EU PTAs with regard to the UK and its trading
            partners remains uncertain: Some elements suggest that these
            PTAs may no longer be valid for the UK, or that, even if
            legally valid, they will no longer cover the relationship
            between the UK and the third country. Further, EU agreements
            focusing on goods only will no longer apply to the UK. For
            these agreements to continue to apply, the UK and the third
            country will need to amend some aspects of the text of the
            agreement as well as of the lists of commitments. Investment
            treaties concluded by the UK with third countries will
            remain valid, and no amendment is in principle necessary.
            Parties could require amendments to the text of the treaty,
            due to a fundamental change in circumstances. LDCs and
            developing countries who benefit from the EU GSP will
            continue under this regime for the remaining EU member, but
            that GSP framework will no longer be applicable to the UK.
            The UK may introduce a new GSP regime of its own. In all
            cases, third countries who consider that Brexit has
            diminished the value of their negotiated commitments have
            the opportunity to request compensation in sectoral
            commitments or changes in the text of the agreements, or
            ultimately terminate the agreement The process of amending
            the trade and investment agreements requires comprehensive
            knowledge of their trade and investment flows with the EU
            and the UK.
An employment guarantee as risk
            insurance assessing the effects of the NREGS on agricultural
            production decisions
Uninsured risk constrains households in
            their production decisions in many developing countries.
            Similarly to crop insurance, employment guarantees can
            support farmers in managing agricultural production risks.
            Evidence from representative panel data of Andhra Pradesh,
            India, suggests that the National Rural Employment Guarantee
            Scheme (NREGS) reduces households' uncertainty about
            future income streams because it provides employment
            opportunities in rural areas independently of weather shocks
            and crop failure. Because the NREGS makes an ex-post labor
            supply response to agricultural shocks more efficient,
            households with access to the NREGS can shift their
            production towards riskier but also more profitable crops.
            The observed shifts in agricultural production do
            considerably raise the profitability of agricultural
            production and hence the incomes of smallholder farmers. The
            findings are not driven by changes in the labor or cost
            intensity of those crops, which supports the idea that the
            causal mechanism underlying the observed changes is indeed
            an insurance effect.
Urbanization and development : is
            Latin America and the Caribbean different from the rest of
            the world
Two long-established stylized facts in
            the urban and development economics literatures are that:
            (a) a country's level of economic development is
            strongly positively correlated with its level of
            urbanization; and (b) a country's level of urbanization
            is strongly negatively correlated with the size of its
            agricultural sector. However, countries in the Latin America
            and Caribbean region appear to depart significantly from the
            rest of the world in these two basic relationships. Although
            Latin American countries appear to be significantly more
            urbanized than predicted based on these global
            relationships, Caribbean countries appear significantly less
            urbanized. However, analyses involving cross-country
            comparisons of urbanization levels are undermined by
            systematic measurement errors arising from differences in
            how countries define their urban areas. This paper
            reexamines whether Latin America and Caribbean countries
            differ from the rest of the world in the basic stylized
            facts of urbanization, development, and structural
            transformation. The analysis makes use of two alternative
            methodologies for the consistent definition of urban areas
            across countries: the Agglomeration Index methodology and a
            methodology based on the identification of dense spatially
            contiguous clusters of population. Both methodologies rely
            on globally gridded population data sets as input. There
            exist several such data sets, and so the paper also assesses
            the robustness of the findings to the choice of input
            population layer.
Egypt : inequality of opportunity in education
The paper examines the levels and trends
            in access to education and educational outcomes across
            generations of Egyptian youth. Examination of three cohorts
            of individuals aged 21 to 24 (born between 1964 and 1967,
            1974 and 1977, and 1982 and 1985) shows that access to
            education has substantially improved during the last three
            decades. Completion rates increased by more than 60 percent
            at the preparatory level and 70 percent at the secondary
            level and the college completion rate more than doubled.
            However, significant inequities remain in access to
            education and educational outcomes. The fraction of never
            enrolled among the cohorts is still large, affecting more
            girls than boys, more rural than urban areas, and more
            children of parents with lower level of education and in
            elementary occupations, such as subsistence agriculture. The
            analysis of test-scores from the Trends in International
            Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and national
            examinations shows that more than a quarter of learning
            outcome inequality is attributable to circumstances beyond
            the control of a student, such as parental education,
            socioeconomic background and place of birth. In Egypt,
            inequality of opportunity in learning outcomes emerges early
            and builds up progressively throughout the education levels.
            Access to higher education continues to remain significantly
            lower for children from rural areas and for those whose
            parents have a low level of education or are engaged in
            elementary occupations. Tracking into vocational and general
            secondary schools, which depends on a high-stakes national
            examination, and high and unequal levels of household
            expenditures in private tutoring substantially contribute to
            unequal learning outcomes.
Seeing is believing evidence from an
            extension network experiment
Extension is designed to enable
            lab-to-farm technology diffusion. Decentralized models
            assume that information flows from researchers to extension
            workers, and from extension agents to contact farmers (CFs).
            CFs should then train other farmers in their communities.
            Such a modality may fail to address informational
            inefficiencies and accountability issues. The authors run a
            field experiment to measure the impact of augmenting the CF
            model with a direct CF training on the diffusion of a new
            technology. All villages have CFs and access the same
            extension network. In treatment villages, CFs additionally
            receive a three-day, central training on the new technology.
            They track information transmission through two nodes of the
            extension network: from extension agents to CFs, and from
            CFs to other farmers. Directly training CFs leads to a
            large, statistically significant increase in adoption among
            CFs. However, higher levels of CF adoption have limited
            impact on the behavior of other farmers.
Use of imported inputs and the cost
            of importing : evidence from developing countries
For a representative sample of
            manufacturing firms in 26 countries, this paper shows that
            changes in the cost of importing over time are significantly
            and negatively correlated with changes in the percentage of
            firms' material inputs that are of foreign origin.
            Furthermore, the paper shows that there may be a nonlinear
            relationship between import costs and imports. These
            findings are important, as recent studies point toward a
            significant positive effect of imported inputs on
            productivity and growth. It is hoped that the present paper
            inspires more work on the determinants of the use of
            imported inputs, especially in developing countries.
Does local financial development
            matter for firm lifecycle in India
The differences in financial development
            across Indian states, while seeming substantial, have a
            minor effect on firm lifecycle and growth. These results
            hold controlling for differences in labor regulations across
            states, capital intensity, and for firms born before and
            after the major reforms. There is no evidence that firms in
            financially dependent industries have different lifecycle
            profiles or grow faster in financially developed states than
            underdeveloped states. Overall, firms in the formal
            manufacturing sector grow as they age whereas in the
            informal sector, firms have a declining lifecycle, but in
            both cases little evidence is found that financial
            institutions matter for firm lifecycle. The findings of this
            paper suggest that size and depth differences in financial
            development across Indian states are likely dwarfed by
            overall inefficiencies that characterize state-dominated
            financial systems, with important implications for the
            reforms of the Indian financial system going forward.
Information is power : experimental
            evidence on the long-run impact of community based monitoring
This paper presents the results of two
            field experiments on local accountability in primary health
            care in Uganda. Efforts to stimulate beneficiary control,
            coupled with the provision of report cards on staff
            performance, resulted in significant improvements in health
            care delivery and health outcomes in both the short and the
            longer run. Efforts to stimulate beneficiary control without
            providing information on performance had no impact on
            quality of care or health outcomes. The paper shows that
            informed users are more likely to identify and challenge
            (mis)behavior by providers and as a result turn their focus
            to issues that they can manage locally.
The African financial development
            and financial inclusion gaps
This paper investigates the African
            financial development and financial inclusion gaps relative
            to other peer developing countries. The paper uses a set of
            variables related to financial development and inclusion. It
            first estimates the gaps between African countries and other
            developing countries with similar degrees of economic
            development. Then, it explores the determinants of financial
            development and inclusion. The analysis finds that
            population density is considerably more important for
            financial development and inclusion in Africa than
            elsewhere. Finally, the paper shows evidence that a recent
            innovation in financial services, mobile banking, has helped
            to overcome infrastructural problems and improve financial access.