rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Mixtures of g-priors for Bayesian
            Model Averaging with economic application
This paper examines the issue of
            variable selection in linear regression modeling, where
            there is a potentially large amount of possible covariates
            and economic theory offers insufficient guidance on how to
            select the appropriate subset. In this context, Bayesian
            Model Averaging presents a formal Bayesian solution to
            dealing with model uncertainty. The main interest here is
            the effect of the prior on the results, such as posterior
            inclusion probabilities of regressors and predictive
            performance. The authors combine a Binomial-Beta prior on
            model size with a g-prior on the coefficients of each model.
            In addition, they assign a hyperprior to g, as the choice of
            g has been found to have a large impact on the results. For
            the prior on g, they examine the Zellner-Siow prior and a
            class of Beta shrinkage priors, which covers most choices in
            the recent literature. The authors propose a benchmark Beta
            prior, inspired by earlier findings with fixed g, and show
            it leads to consistent model selection. Inference is
            conducted through a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler over
            model space and g. The authors examine the performance of
            the various priors in the context of simulated and real
            data. For the latter, they consider two important
            applications in economics, namely cross-country growth
            regression and returns to schooling. Recommendations for
            applied users are provided.
Lasting welfare effects of widowhood
            in a poor country
Little is known about the situation
            facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa
            especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian
            society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in
            rural areas. Households headed by widows have significantly
            lower living standards on average than male or other female
            headed households in both rural and urban areas; this holds
            both unconditionally and conditional on observable household
            and individual characteristics including age. Furthermore,
            the adverse welfare effects of widowhood appear to persist
            even after widows are absorbed into male headed households.
            An examination of individual measures of well-being further
            reveals that, relative to other women, worse outcomes for
            ever-widowed women persist through remarriage. These
            detrimental effects are passed on to children, indicating an
            intergenerational transmission of poverty stemming from widowhood.
The labor market, education and
            armed conflict in Tajikistan
Shortly following its independence in
            1991, Tajikistan suffered a violent civil war. This study
            explores the effect of this conflict on education and labor
            market outcomes for men and women. The results are based on
            the data from the 2003 and 2007 Tajik Living Standards
            Measurement Surveys that were separated from the 1992-1998
            Tajik civil war by five and nine years, respectively. The
            regression analysis that controls for the cohort and
            regional-level exposure points toward a persistent and
            lasting gap in the educational attainment by women who were
            of school age during the war and lived in the more
            conflict-affected regions as compared with women the same
            age who lived in the lesser affected regions and also to the
            older generation. These empirical results support the
            anecdotal and observational evidence about the decline in
            female educational attainment in Tajikistan. Interestingly,
            this group of young women is more likely to hold a job as
            compared with the rest of the analytical sample. Conditional
            on being employed, men and women in the more
            conflict-affected areas do not receive wages that are
            significantly different from wages received by men and women
            in the lesser affected areas.
Efficiency in public procurement in
            Rural Road Projects of Nepal
Transport infrastructure is important
            for economic growth. In Nepal, about 20 percent of rural
            residents have to spend more than 3 hours to go to the
            nearest marketplace or agriculture center. Public
            procurement is an important policy instrument to use
            resources wisely and efficiently. This paper analyzes a
            series of policy questions, from procurement design to
            contract management and project quality assurance. The paper
            finds that the competition effect is significant. To enhance
            competition, bidding documents can be distributed free of
            charge on a website. The bid preparation period can be
            extended. Security issues are also found to be particularly
            important to avoid unnecessary cost overruns and project
            delays. Heavy rainfall and the bidders' low-balling
            strategy are identified as other factors of project delays.
            The quality of roads would deteriorate with not only
            security incidence but also time, precipitation and traffic volume.
Entrepreneurship capital and
            technical efficiency : the role of new business / firms as a
            conduit of knowledge spillovers
Increasingly, entrepreneurship is being
            discussed and considered as a source of high economic growth
            and competitiveness. A conceptual process of creative
            construction that characterizes the dynamics between
            entrants and incumbents can prove quite useful to analyze
            the impact of countries' entrepreneurship capital on
            economic performance and can be a guide for economic policy.
            This paper applies a Stochastic Frontier Analysis approach
            to test the hypothesis that entrepreneurship capital
            promotes economic performance by serving as a conduit of
            knowledge spillovers. In addition, kernel density functions
            are employed to analyze convergence (or divergence) in the
            efficiency estimated for individual countries. The empirical
            evidence and results here tend to support the hypothesis.
            Specifically, the empirical analysis shows that the rate of
            expenditure on research and development in relation to new
            businesses registered has a positive and significant effect
            in increasing technical efficiency. These factors facilitate
            the dissemination of existing knowledge, develop
            entrepreneurship capital, and thus provide the missing link
            to economic performance -- entrepreneurship capital. The
            authors also show the trends and dynamics of changes in
            countries technical efficiency.
Why does the productivity of
            education vary across individuals in Egypt firm size,
            gender, and access to technology as sources of heterogeneity
            in returns to education
The paper estimates the rates of return
            to investment in education in Egypt, allowing for multiple
            sources of heterogeneity across individuals. The paper finds
            that, in the period 1998-2006, returns to education
            increased for workers with higher education, but fell for
            workers with intermediate education levels; the relative
            wage of illiterate workers also fell in the period. This
            change can be explained by supply and demand factors. On the
            supply side, the number workers with intermediate education,
            as well as illiterate ones, outpaced the growth of other
            categories joining the labor force during the decade. From
            the labor demand side, the Egyptian economy experienced a
            structural transformation by which sectors demanding
            higher-skilled labor, such as financial intermediation and
            communications, gained importance to the detriment of
            agriculture and construction, which demand lower-skilled
            workers. In Egypt, individuals are sorted into different
            educational tracks, creating the first source of
            heterogeneity: those that are sorted into the general
            secondary-university track have higher returns than those
            sorted into vocational training. Second, the paper finds
            that large-firm workers earn higher returns than small-firm
            workers. Third, females have larger returns to education.
            Female government workers earn similar wages as private
            sector female workers, while male workers in the private
            sector earn a premium of about 20 percent on average. This
            could lead to higher female reservation wages, which could
            explain why female unemployment rates are significantly
            higher than male unemployment rates. Formal workers earn
            higher rates of return to education than those in the
            informal sector, which did not happen a decade earlier. And
            finally, those individuals with access to technology (as
            proxied by personal computer ownership) have higher returns.
What did the Maoists ever do for us
            education and marriage of women exposed to civil conflict in Nepal
Between 1996 and 2006, Nepal experienced
            violent civil conflict as a consequence of a Maoist
            insurgency, which many argue also brought about an increase
            in female empowerment. This paper exploits within and
            between-district variation in the intensity of violence to
            estimate the impact of conflict intensity on two key areas
            of the life of women in Nepal, namely education and
            marriage. Overall conflict intensity had a small, positive
            effect on female educational attainment, whereas abductions
            by Maoists had the reverse effect. Male schooling was not
            significantly affected by either conflict measure. Conflict
            intensity and Maoist abductions during school age both
            increased the probability of early female marriage, but
            exposure to conflict during marriageable age does not appear
            to have affected women's long-term marriage probability.
The role of inventory adjustments in
            quantifying factors causing food price inflation
The food commodity price increases
            beginning in 2001 and culminating in the food crisis of
            2007/08 reflected a combination of several factors,
            including economic growth, biofuel expansion, exchange rate
            fluctuations, and energy price inflation. To quantify these
            influences, the authors developed an empirical model that
            also included crop inventory adjustments. The study shows
            that, if inventory effects are not taken into account, the
            impacts of the various factors on food commodity price
            inflation would be overestimated. If the analysis ignores
            crop inventory adjustments, it indicates that prices of
            corn, soybean, rapeseed, rice, and wheat would have been,
            respectively, 42, 38, 52, and 45 percent lower than the
            corresponding observed prices in 2007. If inventories are
            properly taken into account, the contributions of the above
            mentioned factors to those commodity prices are 36, 26, 26,
            and 35 percent, respectively. Those four factors, taken
            together, explain 70 percent of the price increase for corn,
            55 percent for soybean, 54 percent for wheat, and 47 percent
            for rice during the 2001-2007 period. Other factors, such as
            speculation, trade policy, and weather shocks, which are not
            included in the analysis, might be responsible for the
            remaining contribution to the food commodity price increases.
Informality and protection from
            health shocks : lessons from Yemen
The informal sector is generally
            believed to be more vulnerable to various risks due to
            limited access to social insurance, but little empirical
            evidence exists to support this statement. This paper
            examines the relationship between informality and protection
            from health risks in Yemen. The formal sector, when defined
            based on pension coverage, largely overlaps with public
            employment where the better educated, more experienced, and
            better informed tend to work. The results indicate that,
            even after accounting for socio-economic status, water
            supply and quality conditions, risky behavior patterns, and
            unobserved heterogeneity, formal sector households have
            better accessibility and affordability to health service.
            This may in part explain better health outcomes among formal
            households, although large heterogeneity across regions
            (urban/rural) exists. However, the role of the existing
            health insurance is found to be unclear. The findings
            reconfirm the importance of policies that promote universal
            access to health service and a risk pooling avenue delinked
            from employment types as well as healthy living conditions
            and lifestyles.
Governance in state-owned
            enterprises revisited : the cases of water and electricity
            in Latin America and the Caribbean
This paper studies the governance
            structure of state-owned enterprises in the water and
            electricity sectors of Latin America and the Caribbean.
            Through a unique dataset, the paper compares 44 leading
            state companies of the region based on an aggregate measure
            of corporate governance and six salient aspects of their
            design: board, chief executive officer, performance
            orientation, management, legal framework, and
            transparency/disclosure. The results indicate the need for
            improvement in areas such as the selection and appointment
            of directors to the board and the performance-orientation of
            the enterprises. The paper also highlights the importance of
            discussing the management of state-owned enterprises in the
            wider context of public sector governance, with particular
            focus on accountability. Moreover, it recognizes the role of
            accountability as central in the management of state-owned
            enterprises, recommending a better understanding of
            regulation and performance management. The paper finds a
            positive correlation between corporate governance and the
            utilities' performance. Among the different aspects of
            corporate governance, performance orientation and
            professional management seem to be the highest contributors
            to well-performing state-owned enterprises. State-owned
            enterprises in the electricity sector show higher governance
            levels than those in the water sector.
War and women's work : evidence
            from the conflict in Nepal
This paper examines how Nepal's
            1996-2006 civil conflict affected women's decisions to
            engage in employment. Using three waves of the Nepal
            Demographic and Health Survey, the authors employ a
            difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of
            war on women's employment decisions. The results
            indicate that as a result of the Maoist-led insurgency,
            women's employment probabilities were substantially
            higher in 2001 and 2006 relative to the outbreak of war in
            1996. These employment results also hold for self-employment
            decisions, and they hold for smaller sub-samples that
            condition on husband's migration status and
            women's status as widows or household heads. Numerous
            robustness checks of the difference-in-difference estimates
            based on alternative empirical methods provide compelling
            evidence that women's likelihood of employment
            increased as a consequence of the conflict.
Commitments to save : a field
            experiment in rural Malawi
This paper reports the results of a
            field experiment that randomly assigned smallholder cash
            crop farmers formal savings accounts. In collaboration with
            a microfinance institution in Malawi, the authors tested two
            primary treatments, offering either: 1) "ordinary"
            accounts, or 2) both ordinary and "commitment"
            accounts. Commitment accounts allowed customers to restrict
            access to their own funds until a future date of their
            choosing. A control group was not offered any account but
            was tracked alongside the treatment groups. Only the
            commitment treatment had statistically significant effects
            on subsequent outcomes. The effects were positive and large
            on deposits and withdrawals immediately prior to the next
            planting season, agricultural input use in that planting,
            crop sales from the subsequent harvest, and household
            expenditures in the period after harvest. Across the set of
            key outcomes, the commitment savings treatment had larger
            effects than the ordinary savings treatment. Additional
            evidence suggests that the positive impacts of commitment
            derive from keeping funds from being shared with one's
            social network.
Decomposing the great trade collapse
            : products, prices, and quantities in the 2008-2009 crisis
The authors identifies a new set of
            stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that they
            hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand
            and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In
            particular, they decompose the fall in international trade
            into product entry and exit, price changes, and quantity
            changes for imports by Brazil, the European Union,
            Indonesia, and the United States. When the authors aggregate
            across all products, most of the countries analyzed
            experienced a decline in new products, a rise in product
            exit, and falls in quantity for product lines that continued
            to be traded. The evidence suggests that the intensive
            rather than extensive margin mattered the most, consistent
            with studies of other countries and previous recessionary
            periods. On average, quantities declined and prices fell.
            However, these average effects mask enormous differences
            across different products. Price declines were driven
            primarily by commodities. Within manufacturing, while most
            quantity changes were negative, in most cases price changes
            moved in the opposite direction. Consequently, within
            manufacturing, there is some evidence consistent with the
            hypothesis that supply side frictions played a role. For the
            United States, price increases were most significant in
            sectors which are typically credit constrained.
Estimating the impact of trade and
            offshoring on American workers using the current population surveys
The authors link industry-level data on
            trade and offshoring with individual-level worker data from
            the Current Population Surveys. They find that occupational
            exposure to globalization is associated with larger wage
            effects than industry exposure. This effect has been
            overlooked because it operates between rather than within
            sectors of the economy. The authors also find that
            globalization is associated with a reallocation of workers
            across sectors and occupations. They estimate wage losses of
            2 to 4 percent among workers leaving manufacturing and 4 to
            11 percent among workers who also switch occupations. These
            effects are most pronounced for workers who perform routine tasks.
A hybrid approach to efficiency
            measurement with empirical illustrations from education and health
Inefficiency is commonplace, yet
            exercises aimed at improving provider performance efforts to
            date to measure inefficiency and use it in benchmarking
            exercises have not been altogether satisfactory. This paper
            proposes a new approach that blends the themes of Data
            Envelopment Analysis and the Stochastic Frontier Approach to
            measure overall efficiency. The hybrid approach
            nonparametrically estimates inefficiency by comparing actual
            performance with comparable real-life "best
            practice" on the frontier and could be useful in
            exercises aimed at improving provider performance. Four
            applications in the education and health sectors are used to
            illustrate the features and strengths of this hybrid approach.
Recent perspectives on trade and inequality
The 1990's dealt a blow to
            traditional Heckscher-Ohlin analysis of the relationship
            between trade and income inequality, as it became clear that
            rising inequality in low-income countries and other features
            of the data were inconsistent with that model. As a result,
            economists moved away from trade as a plausible explanation
            for rising income inequality. In recent years, however, a
            number of new mechanisms have been explored through which
            trade can affect(and usually increase) income inequality.
            These include within-industry effects due to
            heterogeneous?firms; effects of offshoring of tasks; effects
            on incomplete contracting; and effects of labor-market
            frictions. A number these mechanisms have received
            substantial empirical support.
How can micro and small enterprises
            in Sub-Saharan Africa become more productive the impacts of
            experimental basic managerial training
The vast majority of micro and small
            enterprises in developing countries are located in
            industrial clusters, and the majority of such clusters have
            yet to see their growth take off. The performance of micro
            and small enterprise clusters is especially low in
            Sub-Saharan Africa. While existing studies often attribute
            the poor performance to factors outside firms, problems
            within firms are seldom scrutinized. Entrepreneurs in these
            clusters are unfamiliar with standard business practices.
            Based on a randomized experiment in Ghana, this study
            demonstrates that basic-level management training improves
            business practices and performance, although the extent of
            improvement varies considerably among entrepreneurs.