rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Temporary Migration for Long-term Investment
In the presence of credit constraints,
            temporary migration abroad provides an effective strategy
            for workers to accumulate savings to finance self-employment
            when they return home. This paper provides direct evidence
            of this link and its effects on workers’ employment
            trajectories by using a new, large-scale survey of temporary
            migrants from Bangladesh. It constructs and estimates a
            dynamic model that establishes connections between asset
            accumulation and credit constraints, and, thus, between
            workers’ migration and self-employment decisions.
            Interlinked impacts also emerge from simulations of three
            key policy interventions that target migration costs or
            domestic credit constraints for entrepreneurship. Lowering
            migration costs increases emigration, reduces the age at
            which workers depart, and reduces the duration of their time
            abroad, which together lead to higher savings and domestic
            self-employment. Reducing the interest rate for
            entrepreneurial loans reduces migration and savings levels,
            undercutting the positive effects on business creation at
            home. Correcting workers’ inflated perceptions about
            overseas earnings potential reduces emigration rates and
            durations, triggering a decrease of both repatriated savings
            and self-employment in Bangladesh. The findings, which have
            implications for migrant-sending countries, highlight the
            need for policies to take into account the linkages between
            migration and self-employment decisions.
Trade-Policy Dynamics : Evidence
            from 60 Years of U.S.-China Trade
This paper studies the growth of Chinese
            imports into the United States from autarky during 1950–1970
            to about 15 percent of overall imports in 2008, taking
            advantage of the rich heterogeneity in trade policy and
            trade growth across products during this period. Central to
            the analysis is an accounting for the dynamics of trade,
            trade policy, and trade-policy expectations. The analysis
            isolates the lagged effects of past reforms and the current
            effects of uncertainty about future reforms. It builds a
            multi-industry, heterogeneous-firm model with a dynamic
            export participation decision to estimate a path of
            trade-policy expectations. The findings show that being
            granted Normal Trade Relations (NTR) status in 1980 was
            largely a surprise and that, in the early stages, this
            reform had a high probability of being reversed. The
            likelihood of reversal dropped considerably during the
            mid-1980s, and, despite China’s accession to the World Trade
            Organization (WTO) in 2001, changed little throughout the
            late 1990s and early 2000s. Thus, although uncertainty
            depressed trade substantially following the 1980
            liberalization, much of the trade growth that followed
            China’s WTO accession was a delayed response to previous
            reforms rather than a response to declining uncertainty.
Pollution in Ugandan Cities : Do
            Managers Avoid It or Adapt in Place
Developing countries suffer from rising
            urban pollution levels, with associated negative effects on
            health and worker productivity. This paper studies how
            managers in developing country cities cope with the polluted
            environment. High-resolution pollution measurements were
            collected in Ugandan cities and matched with a novel firm
            survey. The analysis finds that firms locate in close
            proximity to major polluted roads, which bundle a bad
            (exposure to pollution) with a good (market demand). Higher
            ability managers do not avoid polluted areas; instead, they
            adapt to the pollution by protecting their workers through
            the provision of equipment and flexibility in work schedule.
Pollution in Ugandan Cities : Do
            Managers Avoid It or Adapt in Place
Policy Research Working Paper 9743 Pollution in Ugandan Cities Do Managers Avoid It or Adapt in Place?

_Vittorio Bassi_ _Matthew E. Kahn Nancy Lozano Gracia Tommaso Porzio Jeanne Sorin_ Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice July 2021
Do Behavioral Interventions Enhance
            the Effects of Cash on Early Childhood Development and Its
            Determinants Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Trial in Madagascar
This paper evaluates the effects of
            interventions based on behavioral science on measures of
            early childhood socio-cognitive development (and related
            household-level outcomes) for children from households
            receiving cash transfers in Madagascar, using a multi-arm
            cluster-randomized trial. Three behavioral interventions (a
            Mother Leaders group and associated activities, by itself or
            augmented with a self-affirmation or a plan-making nudge)
            are layered onto a child-focused cash transfer program
            targeting children from birth to age six years.
            Approximately 18 months into the implementation of these
            interventions and 20 months since baseline, the study finds
            evidence that households in the behaviorally enhanced arms
            undertake more desirable parenting behaviors, interact more
            with their children, prepare more (and more diverse) meals
            at home, and report lower food insecurity than households
            that received only cash. Children from households in several
            of the behaviorally enhanced arms also perform better than
            children from households in the cash-only arm on several
            measures of socio-cognitive development, including language
            learning and social skills.
Testing Classic Theories of
            Migration in the Lab
The predictions of different classic
            migration theories are tested by using incentivized
            laboratory experiments to investigate how potential migrants
            decide between working in different destinations. First, the
            authors test theories of income maximization, migrant
            skill-selection, and multi-destination choice as they vary
            migration costs, liquidity constraints, risk, social
            benefits, and incomplete information. The standard income
            maximization model of migration with selection on observed
            and unobserved skills leads to a much higher migration rate
            and more negative skill-selection than is obtained when
            migration decisions take place under more realistic
            assumptions. Second, these lab experiments are used to
            investigate whether the independence of irrelevant
            alternatives assumption holds. The results show that it
            holds for most people when decisions just involve wages,
            costs, and liquidity constraints. However, once the risk of
            unemployment and incomplete information is added,
            independence of irrelevant alternatives no longer holds for
            about 20 percent of the sample.
Mobile Access Expansion and Price
            Information Diffusion : Firm Performance after Ethiopia’s
            Transition to 3G in 2008
This paper investigates whether enhanced
            access to mobile communications, including internet,
            primarily through smart phones, increases competition as
            price information is more widely available to customers—both
            households and firms. The exogenous shock to identify these
            impacts is the transition from 2G to the 3G broadband
            network standard in 2008, and the induced changes in the
            geographic variation across districts of data plan
            availability for households. The operational mechanism is
            that better household and firm telecommunications access can
            close information asymmetry gaps between buyers and sellers,
            with increased competition leading to improved firm
            performance. Lower markups and reduced price dispersion can
            result from better incentives for firms to preserve and grow
            market share. And as price competition squeezes profit
            margins, there are more incentives for firms to reduce
            costs—inducing higher total factor productivity growth.
            Improved firm performance can generate jobs and economic
            transformation. Indeed, faster productivity growth, due to
            enhanced access for buyers to mobile telecommunications, can
            translate into higher formal employment and wages. One open
            question is whether the potential competition, driven by the
            increased mobile telecommunications access of buyers, which
            help them have the best alternative prices at their
            fingertips, will also impact export-oriented companies. The
            prior is that the firm performance improvement effect would
            be more salient for firms mostly focused on local markets.
            The primary data sources are manufacturing firm census data
            and household expenditure survey data across woredas
            (districts or counties) in Ethiopia. First, the paper
            investigates the relation between expanded access with the
            3G network to price information through mobile phones
            (measured at the woreda level as share of households with
            substantive expenditure to access data through smartphones)
            and firm performance measures (markups, total factor
            productivity, labor productivity, wage growth, wage gaps and
            employment growth.), across districts with different shares
            of mobile telecommunication and data plan penetration
            subscription. The paper estimates models with
            difference-in-differences and triple differences. The
            evidence is consistent with competition intensification
            after the improvement in access to mobile communication due
            to the 3G network rollout. In particular, markups were
            reduced and there was higher growth in productivity, wages,
            and employment.
Warlords, State Failures, and the
            Rise of Communism in China
This paper documents that the spread of
            communism in China was partly caused by state failures in
            the early 20th century. It finds that famines became more
            frequent after China fell into warlord fragmentation,
            especially for prefectures with less rugged borders and
            those facing stronger military threat. The relation between
            topography and famines holds when using historical border
            changes to instrument border ruggedness. More people from
            famine-inflicted prefectures died in the subsequent decades
            for the communist movement, but not for the Nationalist
            Army. There is evidence that famines exacerbated rural
            inequality, which pushed more peasants to the side of the communists.
Mass Messaging and Health Risk
            Reduction : Evidence from COVID-19 Text Messages in Tajikistan
Can mass public health messages change
            behavior during a crisis? This paper assesses the impact of
            a COVID-19 focused text-messaging campaign launched in May
            2020 with the Ministry of Health and Social Protection of
            Tajikistan to encourage compliance with risk reduction
            measures. The initiative sent a series of informational
            messages to about 5.5 million mobile phone subscribers and
            reached at least one member of more than 90 percent of the
            country’s households. An individual fixed effects estimator
            is used to measure changes in reported behavior after a
            respondent lists text messages as a primary source of
            information about COVID-19, or alternatively when reporting
            an official text message in the past week. Listing text
            messaging as a primary source of information increased the
            number of reported behaviors by 0.15 units (p = 0.000) and
            receiving an official text message in the past week
            increased the number by 0.47 units (p = 0.000). These
            effects were driven by more positive responses for wearing
            masks, reducing visits with friends and relatives, reducing
            travel, practicing safer greetings (such as fewer
            handshakes), and safety-related changes at work. The results
            suggest that text messaging–based public health messaging
            was a cost-effective means of increasing awareness in a
            large and geographically dispersed audience during the
            COVID-19 pandemic and that the program led to an increase in
            self-reported risk reducing behaviors.
Economic and Social Development
            along the Urban-Rural Continuum : New Opportunities to
            Inform Policy
The economic and social development of
            nations relies on their population having physical access to
            services and employment opportunities. For the vast majority
            of the 3.4 billion people living in rural locations, this
            largely depends on their access to urban centers of
            different sizes. Similarly, urban centers depend on their
            rural hinterlands. Building on the literature on functional
            areas/territories and the rural-urban continuum as well as
            insights from central place theory, this review paper
            advances the notion of catchment areas differentiated along
            an urban-to-rural continuum to capture these urban-rural
            interconnections. It further shows how a new, publicly
            available data set operationalizing this concept can shed
            new light on policy making across a series of development
            fields, including institutions and governance, urbanization
            and food systems, welfare and poverty, and access to health
            and education services. Together the insights support a more
            geographically nuanced perspective on development.
Economic and Social Development
            along the Urban-Rural Continuum : New Opportunities to
            Inform Policy
Policy Research Working Paper 9756 Economic and Social Development along the Urban-Rural Continuum New Opportunities to Inform Policy _Andrea Cattaneo Anjali Adukia David L. Brown Luc Christiaensen David K. Evans Annie Haakenstad Theresa McMenomy Mark Partridge Sara Vaz Daniel J. Weiss_ Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice August 2021
Climate Shocks, Vulnerability,
            Resilience and Livelihoods in Rural Zambia
To what extent do the behavioral choices
            of Zambian smallholder farmers influence the negative
            effects of climate shocks, and what impact do these choices
            have on vulnerability and resilience? This paper uses
            nationally representative, three-wave household-level panel
            data to investigate these questions. The empirical
            estimation employs an instrumental variable probit
            regression model, which also controls for the endogeneity of
            key choice variables. There are four main empirical
            findings. First, droughts are the most prevalent climate
            shock rural smallholder farmers in Zambia face, but the
            extent of exposure differs spatially, with the Southern and
            Western Provinces being the hardest hit. Nationally, about
            three-quarters of all smallholder farmers are vulnerable and
            only about one-quarter are resilient. Second, increased
            climate shocks correlate with both increased vulnerability
            and reduced resilience, with short- and long-term deviations
            in seasonal rainfall worsening vulnerability and resilience.
            Third, higher asset endowments and education level of the
            household head reduce vulnerability and increase resilience
            among smallholder farmers. Female-headed households are more
            vulnerable and less resilient, on average. Fourth, the use
            of climate-smart agricultural practices—namely, minimum
            tillage and use of inorganic fertilizers or hybrid maize
            seed—significantly improves household resilience in the
            short term. The paper draws two main policy implications
            from the findings. First, the results point to an urgent
            need to invest in research and development for climate
            shock–tolerant crop varieties and in broader climate-smart
            agricultural technologies to scale out and scale up
            context-specific practices through innovative digital
            platforms. Second, more investment is needed in risk
            mitigation strategies such as weather indexed insurance,
            targeted social cash transfers and how to make these work
            effectively for smallholder farmers. Other important
            complementary elements include investment in innovative
            digital platforms that can facilitate timely delivery of
            climate information services and facilitating asset
            accumulation and education that can enable farmers to
            improve climate shock resilience over time.
Nature-Related Financial Risks in Brazil
Biodiversity loss and associated
            economic costs are increasingly recognized as a source of
            financial risks. This paper explores how and to what extent
            Brazilian banks are exposed to the loss of biodiversity
            through their lending to non-financial corporates. The
            results suggest that such exposures are material. Forty-six
            percent of Brazilian banks&#x2019; non-financial
            corporate loan portfolio is concentrated in sectors highly
            or very highly dependent on one or more ecosystem services.
            Output losses associated with the collapse in ecosystem
            services could translate into a cumulative long-term
            increase in corporate nonperforming loans of 9 percentage
            points. Moreover, 15 percent of Brazilian banks&#x2019;
            corporate loan portfolio is to firms potentially operating
            in protected areas, which could increase to 25 percent
            should conservation gaps close, and 38 percent should all
            priority areas become protected. Finally, 7 percent of
            corporate loans are to firms for which environmental
            controversies have been recorded. While preliminary, the
            results have important policy implications for both
            Brazilian banks and Banco Central do Brasil.
Sharing Responsibility through Joint
            Decision Making and Implications for Intimate-Partner
            Violence : Evidence from 12 Sub-Saharan African Countries
Intimate partner violence affects 36
            percent of women in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper examines
            the relationship between decision making within couples and
            the incidence of intimate partner violence across 12 African
            countries. Using the wife’s responses to survey questions,
            the analysis finds that compared with joint decision making,
            sole decision making by the husband is associated with a 3.3
            percentage point higher incidence of physical intimate
            partner violence in the last year, while sole decision
            making by the wife is associated with a 10 percentage point
            higher incidence. Similar patterns hold for emotional and
            sexual violence. When the husband’s report of decision
            making is included in the analysis, joint decision making
            emerges as protective only when spouses agree that decisions
            are made jointly. Notably, agreement on joint decision
            making is associated with lower intimate partner violence
            than agreement on decision making by the husband. Constructs
            undergirding common intimate partner violence theories,
            namely attitudes toward violence, similarity of preferences,
            marital capital, and bargaining, do not explain the
            relationship. The results are instead consistent with joint
            decision making as a mechanism that allows spouses to share
            responsibility and mitigate conflict if the decision is
            later regretted.
Central Bank Governance and Reserve
            Portfolios Investment Policies : An Empirical Analysis
This paper uses a unique survey data set
            of 105 central banks to investigate whether investment
            policies for central bank foreign reserve portfolios are
            linked to the governance arrangements for reserve
            management. The paper evaluates whether a central
            bank's investment decision-making structure impacts how
            much risk institutions take in their reserve management
            operations and the level of diversity in their reserve
            portfolios. Additionally, it explores the implications of
            the broader governance environment on reserve management.
            The analysis yields four key findings. First, internal
            governance arrangements matter for foreign reserve portfolio
            investment policy; the empirical results indicate that
            reserve portfolios are more diversified in central banks in
            which the middle office directly reports to the board.
            Second, controlling for the level of reserves, the
            macroenvironment, and the broader governance environment,
            reserve portfolios are more diversified in central banks
            where the back, middle, and front offices are separated.
            Third, the regression analysis also reveals that central
            banks in countries where the Ministry of Finance has an
            obligation to cover negative equity have fewer eligible
            currencies and are therefore less diversified. Fourth,
            central banks where boards actively exercise portfolio
            oversight usually have portfolios with more risk and
            diversification. Portfolios with longer investment horizons,
            more currencies, and a broader set of asset classes have
            performed better historically while limiting downside risk.
            Given that the analysis controls the broader governance
            environment, the data indicate that any central bank can
            improve its internal governance regardless of the external
            governance environment. This paper contributes to the
            literature on central bank foreign reserves management and
            on understanding the importance of governance arrangements
            in investment policy.