rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Economic and Fiscal Impacts of
            Venezuelan Refugees and Migrants in Brazil
As more and more Venezuelans leave their
            country, fleeing the economic and social crisis, the number
            of Venezuelans in Brazil has risen steadily since 2016,
            constituting about 18 percent of Brazil's 1.3 million
            refugee and migrant population as of October 2020. Although
            the economic gains of immigration are well-documented in the
            literature, the impacts of forced displacement on the labor
            market and government budget are mixed and have mainly
            focused on developed countries. This paper extends the
            previous literature by exploring the short-run fiscal impact
            of Venezuelan refugees and migrants on the public
            expenditure and revenue of Roraima, the state bordering the
            Rep&#xfa;blica Bolivariana de Venezuela at the north and
            the main gateway of the Venezuelan refugees and migrants
            entering Brazil, and by investigating their impact on its
            labor market. Using various administrative and survey data
            and a regression discontinuity framework, the paper finds
            that the population shock caused by the influx of forcibly
            displaced Venezuelans in the short-run did not have any
            statistically significant effect on the fiscal variables of
            Roraima. On the labor market, the paper finds that the
            population shock translated into an increase in unemployment
            among women and a decrease in employment among women and low
            skilled workers in the short-run. The effects on earnings
            are heterogenous across industries, but mainly positive for
            the high skilled and male workers, suggesting a need for
            cross-cutting policies that target the most vulnerable host
            population as well as the forcibly displaced.
The Impact of Corruption on SMEs’
            Access to Finance : Evidence Using Firm-Level Survey Data
            from Developing Countries
The present paper estimates the impact
            of bureaucratic corruption on access to finance of small and
            medium-size enterprises in 114 developing countries.
            Corruption can hurt small and medium-size enterprises’
            access to finance by lowering profits, increasing credit
            demand, increasing bankruptcy chances, creating uncertainty
            about the firm’s future profit, and exacerbating the
            asymmetric information problem between borrowers and
            lenders. Consistent with this view, the findings show a
            large adverse effect of higher corruption on small and
            medium-size enterprises’ access to finance. An increase in
            corruption from its smallest to highest value increases the
            likelihood of small and medium-size enterprises being
            financially constrained from 6.9 to 10.9 percentage points.
            The analysis uncovers several heterogeneities in the
            corruption-finance relationship. For instance, the adverse
            effect of corruption on access to finance is much less in
            countries where financial institutions protect the rights of
            borrowers and lenders are stronger, laws provide for better
            credit information, and credit bureaus exist. The paper
            argues that these heterogeneities derive from the specific
            ways in which corruption impacts access to finance. Thus,
            they help to raise confidence against endogeneity concerns
            about the main results. Other heterogeneities uncovered
            suggest that corruption is more harmful to firms more that,
            absent corruption, are known to enjoy better access to
            finance, such as male versus female owned firms, relatively
            large firms, and better performing firms. The results have
            important policy implications for the growth of small and
            medium-size enterprises in the developing world.
Firm Performance, Participation in
            Global Value Chains and Service Inputs : Evidence from India
This paper explores the relationship
            between the use of service inputs, participation in global
            value chains, and firm productivity. Services play the role
            of both an intermediate input in production and a
            coordinator. Using a detailed Indian firm-level data set
            from 1990&#x2013;2017, the paper estimates the
            productivity premium associated with varying depths of
            global value chain integration and different intensities and
            types of services used in the production. The study finds
            that firms in global value chains have a productivity
            premium between 13 and 22 percent relative to domestic
            firms, with some variation based on the depth of global
            value chain integration and the sector to which the firm
            belongs. Both the type of service inputs used (composition
            of services) and the origin of services (whether sourced
            domestically or from abroad) matter for firm performance.
            While higher aggregate service input use (as captured by the
            share of expenditure on service inputs) is not necessarily
            associated with an increase in productivity, increased use
            of complex services and information technology services is
            associated with higher productivity. The use of imported
            services is associated with higher productivity. Moreover,
            firms that are more deeply integrated in global value chains
            benefit more from importing services.
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic
            on Women-Led Businesses
The COVID-19 pandemic has struck
            businesses across the globe with unprecedented impacts. The
            world economy has been hit hard and firms have experienced a
            myriad of challenges, but these challenges have been
            heterogeneous across firms. This paper examines one
            important dimension of this heterogeneity: the differential
            effect of the pandemic on women-led and men-led businesses.
            The paper exploits a unique sample of close to 40,000 mainly
            formal businesses from 49 countries covering the months
            between April and September 2020. The findings show that
            women-led micro-businesses, women-led businesses in the
            hospitality industry, and women-led businesses in countries
            more severely affected by the COVID-19 shock were
            disproportionately hit compared with businesses led by men.
            At the same time, women-led micro-firms were markedly more
            likely to report increasing the use of digital platforms,
            but less likely to invest in software, equipment, or digital
            solutions. Finally, the findings also show that women-led
            businesses were less likely to have received some form of
            public support although they have been hit harder in some
            domains. In a crisis of the magnitude of the COVID-19
            pandemic, evidence tracing the impact of the shock in a
            timely fashion is desperately needed to help inform the
            design of policy interventions. This real-time glimpse into
            women-led businesses fills this need for robust and
            policy-relevant evidence, and due to the large country
            coverage of the data, it is possible to identify patterns
            that extend beyond any one country, region, or sector, but
            at the cost of some granularity for testing more complex
            economic theories.
Deep Trade Agreement and Foreign
            Direct Investments
Preferential trade agreements are
            growing in number and deepening in content by incorporating
            disciplines that go beyond market access. They increasingly
            encompass non-trade-related disciplines as diverse as
            intellectual property rights, environment laws, or labor
            market regulations. Moreover, because investment is
            complementary to trade, preferential trade agreements
            provide relevant institutional frameworks to partner
            countries that wish to regulate their foreign investments.
            This paper studies the impact of deep trade agreements on
            foreign direct investment and examines three sub-questions.
            First, is the impact of trade agreements on foreign direct
            investment heterogeneous across types of business activity?
            Second, is this impact heterogeneous across disciplines
            covered in the agreements? Third, does the level of
            development of home and host countries matter for this
            impact? The analysis exploits the World Bank’s data set on
            the content of preferential trade agreement and data on
            announcements of bilateral greenfield investment at the
            activity level. The findings show that deep trade agreements
            matter for investment: every additional discipline in a
            preferential trade agreement increases foreign direct
            investment by 1.4 percent, on average. Deep agreements do
            not impact foreign direct investment in natural resources
            and extractive activities and have heterogeneous effects
            across manufacturing- and services-related activities. The
            results also reveal that disciplines that go beyond the
            mandate the World Trade Organization matter more for foreign
            direct investment. Disciplines related to investment
            liberalization and protection, intellectual property rights,
            or migration increase foreign direct investment, whereas
            disciplines on labor market regulations reduce investment.
            The results are mostly driven by investment between
            developed and developing countries.
International Reserves and Central
            Bank Independence
This paper proposes a novel theory of
            reserve accumulation that emphasizes the role of an
            independent central bank. Motivated by a positive
            correlation between reserve accumulation and central bank
            independence in Latin America, the paper develops a
            quantitative sovereign default model with an independent
            central bank that can accumulate a risk-free foreign asset.
            The findings show that if the central bank is more patient
            than the government and as patient as households are, in
            equilibrium, the government issues more debt than what is
            socially optimal, and the central bank accumulates reserves
            to undo government over-borrowing. A key insight is that the
            government can issue more debt for any level of reserves but
            chooses not to because doing so would increase sovereign
            spreads, making it more costly to borrow. Quantitatively,
            the analysis finds that the central bank independence
            channel accounts for 75 percent of the average reserve
            levels observed in Mexico from 1994 to 2017. Finally, the
            paper shows that accumulating reserves improves social
            welfare. Welfare gains come from reducing the costs of
            front-loading public spending.
Global Income Poverty Measurement
            with Preference Heterogeneity : Theory and Application
There is growing support for monitoring
            global poverty using a measure that accounts for both own
            and relative income. This paper shows how&#x2014;in the
            context of heterogeneous preferences over these
            factors&#x2014;the well-known conflict between fairness
            and welfare-consistency can be resolved, establishing the
            first preference-based foundation for both the established
            societal global poverty line and recently proposed
            hierarchical poverty indices. The paper reformulates one
            hierarchical index as a modified headcount ratio. Unlike all
            classic poverty indices, this index is necessarily reduced
            when an individual escapes poverty. The application
            highlights that the proposed index substantially changes the
            assessment of global poverty reduction.
Inequality under COVID-19 : Taking
            Stock of High-Frequency Data for East Asia and the Pacific
While the distributional impacts of the
            COVID-19 pandemic have been well-documented in high-income
            countries, studies in low- and middle-income countries have
            been relatively rare due to data limitations. This paper
            uses pre-pandemic household welfare data and high-frequency
            household phone survey data from seven middle-income
            countries in East Asia and the Pacific, spanning May 2020 to
            May 2021, to analyze the distributional impacts of the
            pandemic and their implications for equitable recovery. The
            results indicate that employment impacts at the extensive
            margin have been large and widespread across the welfare
            distribution during times of stringent mobility restrictions
            (low mobility). When mobility restrictions have been
            relaxed, however, employment impacts have been larger among
            poorer workers who have found it more difficult to return to
            employment. Data on the loss of labor income also suggests
            that the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities. In
            addition to being more susceptible to employment and income
            shocks, poorer households in East Asia and the Pacific are
            at higher risk of experiencing long-term scarring from the
            pandemic &#x2013; due to rising food insecurity,
            increased debt, distress sale of assets, and fewer
            distance/interactive learning opportunities for their
            children. Taken together, the findings indicate that
            inequality has worsened during the pandemic, raising
            concerns about the prospects for an inclusive recovery in
            the absence of appropriate policy measures.
Measuring Systemic Banking
            Resilience : A Simple Reverse Stress Testing Approach
Reverse stress tests can be a useful
            tool to evaluate bank resilience to a credit shock,
            especially in environments where financial data are limited
            or opaque. This paper develops a simple and transparent
            country-level banking sector resilience indicator that
            focuses on tail risks, the Consolidated Distance to
            Breakpoint. Based on individual bank reverse stress test
            results, this novel metric quantifies the increase in
            nonperforming loans needed to deplete capital buffers for a
            subset of the most fragile banks that collectively represent
            at least 20 percent of total banking system assets, a level
            commonly associated with a systemic banking crisis. The
            paper calculates the Consolidated Distance to Breakpoint
            using public data for more than 1,500 banks in 59 emerging
            market and developing economies during the COVID-19
            pandemic. The paper explores the value added of this metric
            in relation to widely used country-level macro-financial and
            soundness indicators. The results show that the association
            of the Consolidated Distance to Breakpoint with these
            macro-financial and financial soundness indicators is
            limited. This suggests that this new indicator encapsulates
            complementary information, possibly because aggregate
            measures may obscure challenges in individual banks. As
            such, the Consolidated Distance to Breakpoint metric could
            serve as a useful input to establish a basic understanding
            of a banking sector’s resilience.
In Someone Else’s Shoes : Reducing
            Prejudice Through Perspective Taking
This study investigates the
            effectiveness of online, low-cost, scalable interventions
            aimed at reducing prejudice against an out-group through the
            use of perspective taking. The authors conducted an online
            experiment in which Colombian natives were randomly assigned
            to either watch a video documentary about Venezuelan forced
            migrants crossing the Colombian border on foot or to play an
            online game that immersed them in the life of a Venezuelan
            forced migrant. Compared to a control group, both treatments
            led to increased altruism towards Venezuelans and improved
            attitudes toward forced migrants. However, only the game
            significantly boosted self-reported trust. In terms of
            effectiveness per minute of treatment, the video was at
            least four times more efficient than the game in enhancing
            prosociality. Given the video&#x2019;s comparably
            shorter duration, greater ease of dissemination, and lower
            demand for active involvement, it appears a superior option
            to enhance prosocial behaviors in the short term.
Short-Term Impacts of Targeted Cash
            Grants and Business Development Services : Experimental
            Evidence from Entrepreneurs in Burkina Faso
Most support programs targeted at small
            firms in low- and middle-income countries fail to generate
            transformative effects at a large scale due to poor
            targeting, too little flexibility, and the limited size of
            the support, among others. This paper assesses the
            short-term effects of a randomized targeted government
            support program for small and medium-size firms that were
            selected based on a business plan competition. One group
            received large cash grants of up to US$8,000, with flexible
            conditions of use. A second group received grants of an
            equally important size but earmarked to business development
            services and thus less flexible and with a required own
            contribution of 20 percent. A third group served as a
            control group. All the firms operate in agribusiness or
            related activities in a semi-urban area. An assessment of
            the short-term impacts shows that beneficiaries of cash
            grants engage in better business practices, such as
            formalization and bookkeeping. They also invest more. Yet,
            this does not translate into higher profits and employment.
            There is no effect on investment and business practices
            among beneficiaries of grants for business development
            services. Yet, both treatment groups show a higher ability
            to innovate relative to the control group. The results also
            show that cash grants cushioned the adverse effects of the
            COVID-19 pandemic. A further round of data collection will
            soon allow assessing the longer-term effects of the
            interventions, which may differ from the short-term effects
            analyzed here as both interventions may need time to unfold
            their full effects.
A Puzzle with Missing Pieces :
            Explaining the Effectiveness of World Bank Development Projects
The identification of key determinants
            of aid effectiveness is a long-standing question in the
            development community. This paper reviews the literature on
            aid effectiveness at the project level and then extends the
            inquiry in a variety of dimensions with new data on World
            Bank investment project financing. It confirms that the
            country institutional setting and quality of project
            supervision are associated with project success, as
            identified previously. However, many aspects of the
            development project cycle, especially project design, have
            been difficult to measure and therefore under-investigated.
            The paper finds that project design, as proxied by the
            estimated value added of design staff, the presence of prior
            analytic work, and other specially collected measures, is a
            significant predictor of ultimate project success. These
            factors generally grow in predictive importance as the
            income level of the country rises. The results also indicate
            that a key determinant of the staff&#x2019;s
            contribution is their experience with previous World Bank
            projects, but not other characteristics such as age,
            education, or country location. Key inputs to the project
            production process associated with subsequent performance
            are not captured in routine data systems, although it is
            feasible to do so. Further, the conceptualization and
            measurement of the success of project-based aid should be
            revisited by evaluative bodies to reflect a
            project&#x2019;s theorized contribution to development outcomes.
Learning to Learn : Experimentation,
            Entrepreneurial Capital, and Development
This paper models an entrepreneur’s
            choice between investing in a safe activity or experimenting
            with a new risky one, and how much to invest in the
            “entrepreneurial capital” that would permit more effective
            use of the arriving information on the latter- how much to
            learn how to learn. Optimal investment in entrepreneurial
            capital depends the expected return on the risky activity.
            It can lead to three learning regimes, two of which can
            generate a development trap where firms and countries are
            unable to assess the potential of newly arriving
            technologies and hence grow more slowly. The first arises
            purely because it is too expensive to learn to learn, the
            second because the returns to the new activity are so high
            that they obviate the need to distinguish between activities
            and hence invest in entrepreneurial capital. The paper draws
            on historical evidence to show how the model offers insights
            into three understudied features of the industrialization
            process in the Western Hemisphere at the beginning of the
            20th century: the disproportionate influence of
            immigrant/foreign entrepreneurs in driving industrialization
            in Latin America; the emergence of selective exceptions to
            this pattern, as well as episodes of entrepreneurial
            retrogression; and the differing effects of similar economic
            structures across countries that suggest the possibility of
            a learning-displacing resource curse. The model can simulate
            the respective decline and boom in the Chilean and US copper
            industries at the turn of the century, arising either from
            initially high relative returns or low initial endowments of
            entrepreneurial capital in the latter.