rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Bankruptcy reorganization through
            markets : Auction-based Creditor Ordering by Reducing Debts (ACCORD)
The authors further develop such a
            market-based approach for situations in which claimants are
            severely cash-constrained and there is good reason for
            existing owner-managers to remain in control. Under the
            ACCORD scheme-Auction-based Creditor Ordering by Reducing
            Debts-creditors remain creditors but form a queue, to be
            serviced in sequence from the firm's operating cash
            flows. Creditors bid for their position in this queue. Those
            accepting greater proportionate reductions in the face value
            of their claims (perhaps most pessimistic about the
            firm's prospects) are placed ahead of the others. A
            preexisting hierarchy of claims is honored by having
            claimants bid for their positions within the relevant
            segment of the queue. No one in the queue, including owners
            (whoa re last), is paid anything until the (reduced) debts
            of the first in line are fully discharged. The queue then
            moves up and the next claimant in line is serviced. Deferred
            creditors, who must wait their turn for the firm's
            operating cash surpluses, are not junior creditors in the
            conventional sense. The authors determine equilibrium
            bidding strategies, showing that the firm's aggregate
            debts would be reduced to a more serviceable level. This
            would improve the incentives of the firm's
            owner-managers, who remain in control, to operate the firm
            efficiently. Economic resources would thus be better used,
            and losses already incurred would be efficiently and quickly
            allocated among creditors. The authors suggest that ACCORD
            would be appropriate for East Asia, where, despite new
            bankruptcy laws, inexperienced courts are unlikely to nudge
            creditors into a quick negotiated agreement nor to be able
            to cope with systemic bankruptcy. Moreover, when the
            government is a major unsatisfied creditor, whose agents may
            not act in the taxpayers' best interests, market-based
            solutions might remove political interference from
            restructuring decisions. Neither owners nor creditors would
            be worse off than they are now.
Financial liberalization and the
            capital account : Thailand, 1988-97
The authors examine Thailand's
            macro-economy and micro-economy for the period 1988-97 to
            assess the extent to which the country's mix of
            macroeconomic and financial sector policies contributed to
            its economic crisis in 1997. They conclude that the crisis
            was fundamentally one of private sector debt, rooted in
            private behavior that affected the magnitude and composition
            of investment and how it was financed. Unlike the Latin
            American debt crisis, the Thai crisis was not caused by
            excessive sovereign borrowing. Financial sector
            weakness--including inadequate regulation and supervision,
            implicit deposit insurance, concentrated ownership
            structures, and poor accounting and disclosure--combined
            with liberalization of the financial sector and capital
            accounts, increased vulnerability by creating incentives for
            risk-taking by financial institutions. Many macroeconomic
            fundamentals were strong, but the combination of tight
            monetary policy and an inflexible exchange rate created
            strong incentives for residents to expose themselves to
            excessive foreign exchange and liquidity risks. Weak
            corporate governance, including close corporate links to the
            banking sector, encouraged risky investments and
            over-diversification in the corporate sector.
Children's growth and poverty
            in rural Guatemala
The author investigates the extent and
            determinants of poor child health and nutrition in rural
            Guatemala, as reflected in attained height. Exploiting a
            rich data set on relevant social, economic, ethnic, and
            geographic characteristics, he estimates the role played by
            exogeneous individual, household, and community covariates
            in shaping differentials in children's height. Then he
            addresses empirical questions ignored in previous
            anthropometric research, such as the distribution of child
            stunting across communities and the magnitude of
            intra-family correlation of height-for-age outcomes, before
            and after controlling for observed covariates. The author
            estimates are guided by the economic model of the family and
            the proximate determinants framework. The author fits
            multilevel models to hierarchically clustered data to
            control for family and community heterogeneity. His results
            confirm findings from previous research, suggesting that
            poor child growth outcomes in Guatemala are the result of
            widespread poverty. He finds that height-for-age
            differentials between children of latino mothers and
            children of indigenous mothers who do not speak Spanish are
            larger among children living in communities with better
            health care facilities. Estimates derived from multilevel
            models reveal much clustering of child height-for-age
            outcomes within families and communities. The models account
            for most of the community-level variation in child growth
            patterns, but explain only half of the overall intra-family correlation.
Regulating privatized
            infrastructures and airport services
For a World Bank Institute course on
            transport privatization, the authors cover basic issues
            associated with the regulation of privatized airport
            infrastructure and services: 1) Economic characteristics of
            airport. Three types of activities are carried out in
            airports: essential operational services (aeronautical and
            non-aeronautical), handling services (aeronautical and
            non-aeronautical), and commercial activities. Demand for
            basic airport services is directly influenced by trip
            purpose. The two types of airline customers (business and
            leisure travelers) need different levels of flexibility and
            tend to travel at different times. Analyzing airport
            capacity (practical and saturation) under peak demand is
            essential to airport success. Among other important issues:
            runway cost, level and volume of service, pollution,
            congestion, and air traffic control. 2) Recent trends in the
            airport industry. The movement toward privatization may
            involve public ownership and private operation, including
            joint ventures; partial or majority divestiture; management
            contracts; and BOT (build-operate-transfer) schemes and
            variants, including BOOT (build-own-operate-transfer)
            schemes and LDO (lease-develop-operate) schemes. Or it may
            involve private ownership and operation. 3) Price
            regulation. Topics covered include traditional pricing
            policies' price regulation through an RPI-X formula;
            charges for congestion, noise, and other externalities;
            investment plans; and design of the regulatory system. 4)
            Regulation of quality in the industry. Topics covered:
            regulation of services to passengers (as measured by targets
            for check-in queues, immigration queues, baggage reclaim
            queues, concourse crowding, shopping, parking, and so on);
            fault repair times; average levels of passenger boarding and
            disembarkation and baggage delivery; safety; and investment
            obligation. 5) Performance indicators in the industry.
            Topics covered: strategic indicators and other financial
            indicators (including revenues), as well as indicators of
            cost, productivity, and quality of service.
Technology accumulation and
            diffusion : is there a regional dimension
Recently, interest in regionalism has
            mushroomed, and economists have analyzed it not only from
            the viewpoint of trade but that of foreign investment,
            macroeconomics, and political economy. But questions of
            technological regionalism -whether the accumulation and
            diffusion of technology has a regional dimension- have been
            considered only marginally and indirectly. The author offers
            an exploratory analysis of the regional dimension of
            technology and diffusion, examining both country and
            sectoral aspects of it. Empirical results suggest that
            regional trade agreements do not necessarily lead to
            spillover paterns in regional knowledge. But knowledge may
            be diffused through vehicles other thn trade. National
            patterns of technological accumulation seem more important
            than regional patterns. In particular , more
            internationalized economies seem capable of commanding a
            substantial amount of knowledge diffusion, which may
            sometimes follow regional patterns. These conclusions are
            partly confirmed by sectoral estimates that show that
            regional patterns of knowledge diffusion are highly
            sector-specific. The knowledge bae varies greatly across sectors.
What educational production
            functions really show : a positive theory of education spending
The accumulated results of empirical
            studies show that the public sector typically chooses
            spending on inputs such that the productivity of additional
            spending on books and instructional materials is 10 to 100
            times larger than that of additional spending on teacher
            inputs (for example, higher wages, small class size). The
            authors argue that this pervasive and systemic deviation of
            actual spending from the technical optimum requires a
            political, not economic or technical, explanation. The
            evidence is consistent only with a class of positive models
            in which public spending choices are directly influenced by
            a desire for higher spending on teacher inputs, over and
            above their role in producing educational outputs. This
            desire could be due either to teacher power, or bureaucratic
            budget-maximizing behavior, or political patronage. The
            authors conclude by exploring the implications of these
            positive political models of educational spending behavior
            for various types of proposed educational reforms (localized
            control, parental participation, vouchers, and so on) which
            requires an examination of how the proposed reforms shift
            the relative powers of the stakeholders in the educational
            system: students and parents, educators, bureaucrats, and politicians.
Was the credit channel a key
            monetary transmission mechanism following the recent
            financial crisis in the Republic of Korea
The author investigates whether the
            credit channel is a key monetary transmission mechanism in
            the Republic of Korea, especially after its recent financial
            crisis. To identify the existence of a distinctive credit
            channel (especially the bank lending channel), he applies
            two empirical tests to both aggregate financial data and
            disaggregated bank balance sheet data. As a more definitive
            analysis of the role of the credit channel, he estimates a
            disequilibrium model of the bank loan market, specifying
            separate loan demand and supply equations to characterize
            the credit crunch and identify its intensity in the wake of
            the crisis. The author finds convincing evidence of the
            importance of the credit channel in the aftermath of the
            crisis. Bank lending plays a significant independent role in
            amplifying the real effects of the tightened monetary policy
            implemented in response to the crisis. There is strong
            evidence to suggest a substantial excess demand for bank
            loans following the crisis. This excess demand was caused by
            a sharp decline in loan supply largely attributable to
            pervasive and stringent bank capital regulation (a
            capital-induced bank credit crunch), rather than by weak
            demand for loans.
Learning outcomes and school
            cost-effectiveness in Mexico : the PARE program
Past research often attributed most
            differences in student learning to socioeconomic factors,
            implying that the potential for direct educational
            interventions to reduce learning inequality was limited. The
            author shows that learning achievement can be improved
            through appropriately designed and reasonably
            well-implemented interventions. The author studies the
            impact of the Programa para Abatir el Rezago Educativo
            (PARE), a program designed to improve the quality and
            efficiency of primary education in four Mexican states by
            improving school resources. The PARE program increased
            learning achievement in rural and native schools, where
            students had typically not performed as well as other
            students (in Spanish). Not only did students' cognitive
            abilities improve under the PARE program, but the
            probability of their continuing in school improved. In rural
            areas where the PARE design was fully implemented, test
            scores for the average student increased considerably. A 30
            percent deficit in test scores among rural students could be
            overcome by roughly doubling the resources allocated per student.
Social exclusion and land
            administration in Orissa, India
The authors report on the first
            empirical study of its kind to examine - from the
            perspective of transaction costs - factors that constrain
            access to land for the rural poor and other socially
            excluded groups in India. They find that: a) Land reform has
            reduced large landholdings since the 1950s. Medium size
            farms have gained most. Formidable obstacles still prevent
            the poor from gaining access to land. b) The complexity of
            land revenue administration in Orissa is partly the legacy
            of distinctly different systems, which produced more or less
            complete and accurate land records. These not-so-distant
            historical records can be important in resolving
            contemporary land disputes. c) Orissa tried legally to
            abolish land-leasing. Concealed tenancy persisted, with
            tenants having little protection under the law. d)
            Women's access to and control over land, and their
            bargaining power with their husbands about land, may be
            enhanced through joint land titling, a principle yet to be
            realized in Orissa. e) Land administration is viewed as a
            burden on the state rather than a service, and land records
            and registration systems are not coordinated. Doing so will
            improve rights for the poor and reduce transaction costs -
            but only if the system is transparent and the powerful do
            not retain the leverage over settlement officers that has
            allowed land grabs. Land in Orissa may be purchased,
            inherited, rented (leased), or - in the case of public land
            and the commons - encroached upon. Each type of transaction
            - and the State's response, through land law and
            administration - has implications for poor people's
            access to land. The authors find that: 1) Land markets are
            thin and transaction costs are high, limiting the amount of
            agricultural land that changes hands. 2) The fragmentation
            of landholdings into tiny, scattered plots is a brake on
            agricultural productivity, but efforts to consolidate land
            may discriminate against the rural poor. Reducing
            transaction costs in land markets will help. 3) Protecting
            the rural poor's rights of access to common land
            requires raising public awareness and access to information.
            4) Liberalizing land-lease markets for the rural poor will
            help, but only if the poor are ensured access to
            institutional credit.
Does child labor displace schooling
            - evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy
The authors try to determine whether
            children sent to work in rural Bangladesh are caught in a
            poverty trap, with the extra income to poor families from
            child labor coming at the expense of the children's
            longer-term prospects of escaping poverty through education.
            The poverty trap argument depends on children's work
            being substitutable for schooling. Casual observations and
            the descriptive statistics available from surveys seem to
            offer little support for the argument. To explore the
            question more deeply, the authors use a targeted school
            stipend to identify how much child labor substitutes for
            schooling. They find that Bangladesh's
            Food-for-Education program is a strong incentive for school
            attendance. A stipend with a value considerable less than
            the mean child wage was enough to ensure nearly full school
            attendance among participants. The enrollment also reduced
            the incidence of child labor, an effect accounted for only a
            small proportion of the increase in school enrollment. The
            reduction in the incidence of child labor among boys (girls)
            represents about one-quarter (one-eighth) of the increase in
            their school enrollment rate. Parents are clearly
            substituting other uses of their children's time to
            secure income gain from access to the program, with modest
            impact on earnings from their children's work. The
            authors' tests were limited. Work may well displace
            time for doing homework or attending after-school tutorials,
            for example. The authors were unable to identify such
            effects from the data available. There may also be other
            welfare losses to children from work (such as exposure to an
            unsafe working environment) as well as welfare gains (such
            as skills learned from working that enhance returns to
            schooling). But their results do lead them to question the
            seemingly common view that child labor is a major factor
            perpetuating poverty in Bangladesh by keeping children from
            poor families our of school.
High-level rent-seeking and
            corruption in African regimes : theory and cases
One explanation for Africa's
            failure to develop is the weakness of its public
            institutions. The authors consider one aspect of that
            weakness: rent-seeking and corruption at the top of
            government. Under the conditions of their model, and
            autocrat who seeks to maximize personal financial return
            favors an inefficiently large public sector and distorts
            other public sector priorities more than does an autocrat
            who seeks to maximize national income. However, if civil
            servants and public officials are also venal, the ruler will
            not favor so large a government. To show how African regimes
            operate, the authors present four cases illustrating issues
            raised by their theoretical model. Among their observations
            about the relationship between the motivations of top
            officials and policies to control corruption and other types
            of rent-seeking are these: A kleptocrat whose decision
            variable is the level of government intervention in the
            economy will select an excessive level of interventions, in
            which national income is less than optimal. Like all
            monopolies, the kleptocrat seeks productive efficiency
            except where inefficiency creates extra rents. Facing a
            kleptocrat, citizens prefer a smaller than optimal-sized
            government but get one that is too big. A kleptocrat may
            need to permit lower-level officials to share in corrupt
            gains thus introducing additional costs. He or she will then
            favor a smaller government than if subordinates could be
            perfectly controlled. Dropping the assumption of a single
            dimension of government intervention, the kleptocrat will
            favor a different mixture of tax, spending, and regulatory
            programs than will a benevolent autocrat. Dropping the
            assumption that rulers are writing on a clean slate,
            decisions to privatize or nationalize firms can differ
            across autocratic regimes. In particular, although
            kleptocrats will often be reluctant to privatize, they may
            in some cases support privatization that a benevolent ruler
            would oppose. Investment in countries with kleptocratic
            rules may have an overly short-run orientation. When
            rent-seeking at top levels is pervasive, both natural
            resources and foreign aid under state control may hamper,
            not encourage, growth.