rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Better than most : teacher beliefs
            about effort and ability in Uganda
Do teachers have accurate beliefs about
            their effort and ability? This paper explores this through a
            survey experiment in public-private partnership schools in
            Uganda, wherein teacher self-beliefs are contrasted with
            their beliefs about other teachers in the same school. The
            study finds that, on average, teachers tend to rate ability,
            effort, and job satisfaction more positively for themselves
            than for other teachers. This tendency is called high
            relative self-regard. The study finds no systematic evidence
            of high relative self-regard around perceptions of student
            engagement quality and available support structures. More
            experienced teachers are less likely to exhibit high
            relative self-regard, while teachers showing low effort are
            more likely to exhibit it. This is analogous to the
            Dunning-Kruger effect in psychology, except respondents rate
            themselves as better than most (not better than average) and
            variation is explored over effort (not cognitive ability).
            High relative self-regard is less pronounced in
            owner-managed public-private partnership schools, suggesting
            that when principle-agent problems are less severe, schools
            find ways to correct for inaccurate teacher self-beliefs.
            These results provide suggestive evidence of cognitive
            biases that help teachers rationalize suboptimal effort in
            the classroom. This in turn points to the importance of
            providing objective feedback to teachers about their effort
            and performance as one potential way to improve their
            performance. Teacher self-beliefs are important areas of
            intervention because they are likely to affect how teachers
            optimize their effort and training investments. Self-beliefs
            are also likely to affect how teachers respond to changes in
            incentive and accountability regimes.
Overview and meta-analysis of global
            water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) impact evaluations
This paper presents an overview and
            meta-analysis of the effects of water, sanitation, and
            hygiene interventions around the world. It is based on 136
            impact evaluations (randomized and quasi-experimental
            studies) that explore the effects of water, sanitation, and
            hygiene interventions on health and non-health outcomes,
            ranging from behavior change -- such as the adoption of
            water treatment -- to school attendance rates, to a
            reduction in diarrhea. The selected impact evaluations were
            divided into five groups, and meta-regressions with fixed
            effects (at the regional level) and random effects were
            performed, controlling for each study's characteristics
            (implementing organization, sample sizes, type of
            publication, number of publication views, and so forth). All
            results are reported as changes in odds ratios, with respect
            to the standard deviation of reported effects. Water,
            sanitation, and hygiene interventions were found to increase
            the likelihood of behavior changes and the adoption of new
            hygiene practices by 17 percent. The smallest effects were
            observed from water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions
            aimed at reducing the rates of child mortality and
            non-diarrheal disease. Water, sanitation, and hygiene
            interventions implemented in schools showed statistically
            significant results in reducing school absenteeism and
            dropouts. Similarly, the results showed a statistically
            significant aggregate likelihood of increased access to safe
            water and improved water quality, as well as increased water
            treatment options -- a difference of one-fifth with respect
            to the standard deviation of the average effect size
            reported. Finally, the results showed that water,
            sanitation, and hygiene interventions reduced the likelihood
            of the incidence of diarrheal and enteric disease by 13
            percent, which is consistent with findings in other
            meta-analyses of the same subject.
The labor productivity gap between
            female and male-managed firms in the formal private sector
This study analyzes gender differences
            in labor productivity in the formal private sector, using
            data from 128 mostly developing economies. The results
            reveal a sizable unconditional gap, with labor productivity
            being approximately 11 percent lower among female- than
            male-managed firms. The analyses are based on female
            management, which is more strongly associated with labor
            productivity than female participation in ownership, which
            has been the focus of most previous studies. Decomposition
            techniques reveal several factors that contribute to lower
            labor productivity of female-managed firms relative to
            male-managed firms: fewer female- than male-managed firms
            protect themselves from crime and power outages, have their
            own websites, and are (co-) owned by foreigners. In
            addition, in the manufacturing sector, female-managed firms
            are less capitalized and have lower labor cost than
            male-managed firms.
Agriculture, aid and economic growth
            in Africa
How can foreign aid to agriculture
            support economic growth in Africa? This paper constructs a
            geographically-indexed applied general equilibrium model
            that considers pathways through which aid might affect
            growth and structural transformation of labor markets in the
            context of soil nutrient variation, minimum subsistence
            consumption requirements, domestic transport costs, labor
            mobility and constraints to self-financing of agricultural
            inputs. Using plausible parameters, the model is presented
            for Uganda as an illustrative case. Three stylized scenarios
            demonstrate the potential economy-wide impacts of both soil
            nutrient loss and replenishment, and how foreign aid can be
            targeted to support agricultural inputs that boost rural
            productivity and shift labor to boost real wages. One
            simulation shows how a temporary program of targeted
            official development assistance (ODA) for agriculture could
            generate, contrary to traditional Dutch disease concerns, an
            expansion in the primary tradable sector and positive
            permanent productivity and welfare effects, leading to a
            steady decline in the need for complementary ODA for budget support.
Services development and comparative
            advantage in manufacturing
Most manufacturing activities use inputs
            from the financial and business services sectors. But these
            services sectors also compete for resources with
            manufacturing activities, provoking concerns about
            de-industrialization -- financial services in industrial
            countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, and
            business services in developing countries like India and the
            Philippines. This paper examines the implications of
            services development for the export performance of
            manufacturing sectors. It develops a methodology to quantify
            the indirect role of services in international trade in
            goods and constructs new measures of revealed comparative
            advantage based on domestic value added in gross exports.
            The paper shows that the development of financial and
            business services enhances the revealed comparative
            advantage of manufacturing sectors that use these services
            intensively but not that of other manufacturing sectors. It
            also finds that a country can partially overcome the
            handicap of an underdeveloped domestic services sector by
            relying more on imported services inputs. Thus, lower
            services trade barriers in developing countries can help to
            promote their manufacturing exports.
Technology, taxation, and
            corruption: evidence from the introduction of electronic tax filing
Many e-government initiatives introduce
            technology to improve efficiency and avoid potential human
            bias. Electronic tax filing (e-filing) is an important
            example, as developing countries increasingly adopt online
            submission of tax declarations to replace in-person
            submission to tax officials. This paper examines the impact
            of e-filing on compliance costs, tax payments, and bribe
            payments using experimental variation and data from
            Tajikistan firms. Firms that e-file have lower compliance
            costs, spending five fewer hours each month on fulfilling
            tax obligations. There are no significant average effects of
            e-filing on tax or bribe payments, but significant
            heterogeneity exists across firms by their baseline
            likelihood of tax evasion. Among firms previously more
            likely to evade, e-filing doubles tax payments, likely by
            disrupting collusion with officials. Conversely, among firms
            less likely to have been evading, e-filing reduces tax
            payments, suggesting that officials had previously required
            them to pay more. These firms also pay fewer bribes, as
            e-filing reduces opportunity for extortion. In all, the
            results indicate that e-filing reduces compliance costs and
            makes the distribution of tax payments across firms arguably
            more equitable.
Conflict and the nature of
            precautionary wealth
The paper uses a detailed household
            survey to document precautionary wealth accumulation in
            Afghanistan, with wealth being significantly higher for
            households facing higher income uncertainty. Annual
            household expenditure on nondurable goods is also lower for
            these households. There is no significant difference in the
            wealth response to income uncertainty across high- and
            low-conflict provinces. However, the constituents of
            precautionary wealth vary drastically. While households in
            the low-conflict regions rely almost exclusively on
            livestock to iron out uncertainty, households in the
            high-conflict areas also build up a reserve of gold and
            silver. This shift in household portfolio suggests a more
            substantial decline in real returns of livestock relative to
            jewelry in high-conflict provinces.
What teachers believe : mental
            models about accountability, absenteeism, and student learning
The time teachers spend teaching is low
            in several developing countries. However, improving teacher
            effort has proven difficult. Why is it so difficult to
            increase teacher effort? One possibility is that teachers
            are resistant to increasing effort because they do not
            believe their effort is suboptimal. Such beliefs may be
            based on their mental models on absenteeism, accountability,
            and student learning. This paper explores this idea using
            data from 16,000 teachers across eight developing countries,
            spanning five regions. It finds that, on average, teachers
            support test-based accountability and believe that they are
            in fact held accountable for student learning. In several
            countries, many teachers tend to normalize two types of
            suboptimal behaviors. These are (i) certain types of
            absenteeism, and (ii) paying extra attention to
            well-performing and well-resourced students. Finally, the
            paper shows that ideas of accountability and absenteeism are
            strongly framed by context in two direct ways. The first is
            whether teachers favor exclusively reward-based forms of
            accountability. The second is the degree to which they
            support absenteeism linked to community tasks. These results
            provide actionable insights on how changing teacher behavior
            sustainably might require reshaping underlying mental models.
Social protection in Niger: what
            have shocks and time got to say
Social protection programs, common in
            developing countries, can be wide ranging. Expenditures on
            social schemes are large, but their effectiveness and
            ability to act as safety nets against shocks can be limited.
            This paper devises a tractable empirical framework to
            explore several hypotheses in social protection schemes in
            Niger. The analyses document two important results. First,
            non-poverty status and household consumption expenditures
            decline remarkably when exposed to extreme shocks, that is,
            declines between 31 and 48 percentage points and 24,278 and
            47,549 CFA, respectively. In response, affected households
            employ a vector of strategies to deal with realized shocks,
            ranging from the use of livestock holdings to doing nothing.
            There is evidence of substitution across the shock-strategy
            set over time. Engaging in migration as a coping mechanism
            leads to worse household outcomes. This result can be
            explained by theories of asymmetric information between
            migrants and their families, and unfavorable labor market
            conditions at migrants' destination. Second, social
            transfers are crucial only in the second quarter of the
            calendar year. Social assistance provided within the second
            quarter appear to be effective on average and significantly
            dampens the impact of shocks on households' consumption
            and vulnerability. The paper interprets this finding as
            evidence against the long-standing incentive-hypothesis that
            providing social assistance is a disincentive for households
            to engage in possible coping strategies, and makes them more
            sensitive to external shocks for behavioral reasons. The
            results have important implications for the design and
            delivery of social assistance programs.
The burden of water shortages on
            informal firms
The informal sector in developing
            economies is a significant source of livelihood for a
            sizable portion of the population. This study uncovers the
            effect of poor water infrastructure on the productivity of
            informal firms. This is achieved using firm-level data for
            12 developing economies between 2009 and 2014. The findings
            indicate that an increase of one standard deviation of the
            total duration of water shortages in a month can lead to
            annual average losses of about 14.5 percent of the monthly
            sales per worker for the average informal firm in the sample
            that uses water for business activities.
Quantifying the impacts of capturing
            territory from the government in the Republic of Yemen
This paper estimates the welfare change
            arising from the capture of the Republic of Yemen`s capital
            in 2014, using a multi-themed household survey conducted as
            the capital was captured. Despite the little violence in
            this setting, the increase in fragility resulted in a large
            decline in household welfare driven by both a decline in
            income and an increase in food prices. Beyond traditional
            welfare metrics, women were affected by the fragility more
            so than men, where there was a nearly universal drop in
            women's decision-making ability that did not differ
            based on a woman's bargaining position in the
            household. Furthermore, this decline in decision making was
            immediate, and did not continue to worsen in the months
            towards the end of the period when household welfare dropped
            the most. Lastly, the tumultuous setting had implications
            for individuals' ability to report their subjective
            welfare in accordance with their unambiguous decline in
            traditional welfare metrics.
Taking stock of economic regulation
            of power utilities in the developing world : a literature review
The model of power sector reform that
            emerged during the 1990s placed considerable emphasis on the
            creation of an independent regulatory agency, with a strong
            orientation toward technically-driven tariff-setting
            procedures. Despite widespread uptake of regulation,
            implementation has proved to be challenging in the
            developing world. Regulators were seldom as independent as
            originally envisaged, with widespread divergence between the
            formal regulatory framework and the day-to-day practice of
            regulation. In practice, many developing countries operate
            with “advisory regulators” whose main role is to provide
            technical support to the ultimate political decision makers.
            Nevertheless, there is some evidence that regulation has had
            a positive performance impact, particularly where utilities
            are privatized and in middle-income settings. But the impact
            is more questionable in cases where regulation is primarily
            directed toward state-owned enterprises, which lack the
            commercial incentives to respond to regulatory instruments.
            On the choice of regulatory regimes, the ongoing debate
            between price cap and rate of return regulation suggests
            that the latter may be better suited to developing country
            environments where the priority is to provide predictable
            returns to support large capital investment programs.
            Furthermore, the advent of technological disruption in the
            power sector demands an adaptation of the way in which
            regulatory instruments are designed and applied. Regulators
            will need to pay closer attention to providing the right
            incentives for utilities to innovate and become more energy
            efficient, and for consumers to take economically grounded
            decisions on distributed generation. Finally, the literature
            leaves many important questions unanswered, such as how
            regulatory design affects regulatory effectiveness and the
            impact of tariff regulation on cost recovery.
Gendered language
Languages use different systems for
            classifying nouns. Gender languages assign many -- sometimes
            all -- nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and
            feminine. Drawing on a broad range of historical and
            linguistic sources, this paper constructs a measure of the
            proportion of each country's population whose native
            language is a gender language. At the cross-country level,
            this paper documents a robust negative relationship between
            the prevalence of gender languages and women's labor
            force participation. It also shows that traditional views of
            gender roles are more common in countries with more native
            speakers of gender languages. In African countries where
            indigenous languages vary in terms of their gender
            structure, educational attainment and female labor force
            participation are lower among those whose native languages
            are gender languages. Cross-country and individual-level
            differences in labor force participation are large in both
            absolute and relative terms (when women are compared to
            men), suggesting that the observed patterns are not driven
            by development or some unobserved aspect of culture that
            affects men and women equally. Following the procedures
            proposed by Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) and Oster
            (2017), this paper shows that the observed correlations are
            unlikely to be driven by unobservables. Using a permutation
            test based on the structure of the language tree and the
            distribution of languages across countries, this paper
            demonstrates that the results are not driven by spurious
            correlations within language families. Gender languages
            appear to reduce women's labor force participation and
            perpetuate support for unequal treatment of women.
Anatomy of credit-less recoveries
The recovery from the global crisis that
            erupted in 2007 shows that the decoupling between real and
            financial variables during the business cycle can lead to
            negative and long-lasting consequences for the economy. A
            key feature of the past global crisis in many countries is
            that the recovery in aggregate output has not been
            accompanied by a contemporary pick-up in lending flows to
            the private sector, rendering the recovery credit-less. This
            paper uses data on output and credit to study the relative
            roles of demand and supply drivers of credit growth during
            economic recoveries on a sample of advanced and emerging
            countries between 1980 and 2014. Using a simple endowment
            economy model, the paper shows that credit-less recoveries
            are correlated with liquidity shocks in real and financial
            markets and with the pace of private sector deleveraging.
            The empirical analysis shows that during these episodes
            demand-side frictions played a relatively larger role in
            predicting the occurrence of the episodes, reflecting weak
            demand for liquidity by the private sector in the aftermath
            of the crisis.