rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Do different types of assets have
            differential effects on child education evidence from Tanzania
To assess the conventional view that
            assets uniformly improve childhood development through
            wealth effects, this paper tests whether different types of
            assets have different effects on child education. The
            analysis indicates that household durables and housing
            quality have the expected positive effects, but agricultural
            assets have adverse effects on highest grade completed and
            no effects on exam performance. Extending the standard
            agricultural-household model by explicitly including child
            labor, the study uses three waves of panel data from
            Tanzania to estimate the effects of household assets on
            child education. The analysis corrects for the endogeneity
            of assets and uses a Hausman-Taylor instrumental variable
            panel data estimator to identify the effects of
            time-invariant observables and more efficiently control for
            time-invariant unobservables. The negative effect of
            agricultural assets is more pronounced among rural children
            and children from farming households, presumably due to the
            higher opportunity cost of their schooling.
Societal poverty : a relative and
            relevant measure
Poverty lines are typically higher in
            richer countries, and lower in poorer ones, reflecting the
            relative nature of national assessments of who is considered
            poor. In many high-income countries, poverty lines are
            explicitly relative, set as a share of mean or median
            income. Despite systematic variation in how countries define
            poverty, global poverty counts are based on fixed-value
            lines. To reflect national assessments of poverty in a
            global headcount of poverty, this paper proposes a societal
            poverty line. The proposed societal poverty line is derived
            from 699 harmonized national poverty lines, and has an
            intercept of $1 per day and a relative gradient of 50
            percent of median national income or consumption. The
            societal poverty line is more closely aligned with national
            definitions of poverty than other proposed relative lines.
            By this relative measure, societal poverty has fallen
            steadily since 1990, but at a much slower pace than absolute
            extreme poverty.
Predicting conflict
This paper studies the performance of
            alternative prediction models for conflict. The analysis
            contrasts the performance of conventional approaches based
            on predicted probabilities generated by binary response
            regressions and random forests with two unconventional
            classification algorithms. The unconventional algorithms are
            calibrated specifically to minimize a prediction loss
            function penalizing Type 1 and Type 2 errors: (1) an
            algorithm that selects linear combinations of correlates of
            conflict to minimize the prediction loss function, and (2)
            an algorithm that chooses a set of thresholds for the same
            variables, together with the number of breaches of
            thresholds that constitute a prediction of conflict, that
            minimize the prediction loss function. The paper evaluates
            the predictive power of these approaches in a set of
            conflict and non-conflict episodes constructed from a large
            country-year panel of developing countries since 1977, and
            finds substantial differences in the in-sample and
            out-of-sample predictive performance of these alternative
            algorithms. The threshold classifier has the best overall
            predictive performance, and moreover has advantages in
            simplicity and transparency that make it well suited for
            policy-making purposes. The paper explores the implications
            of these findings for the World Bank's classification
            of fragile and conflict-affected states.
Does energy efficiency promote
            economic growth : evidence from a multi-country and
            multi-sector panel data set
This paper examines the causal
            relationship between energy efficiency and economic growth
            based on panel data for 56 high- and middle-income countries
            from 1978 to 2012. Using a panel vector autoregression
            approach, the study finds evidence of a long-run Granger
            causality from economic growth to lower energy intensity for
            all countries. The study also finds evidence of long-run
            bidirectional causality between lower energy intensity and
            higher economic growth for middle-income countries. This
            finding suggests that beyond climate benefits, middle-income
            countries may also earn an extra growth dividend from energy
            efficiency measures.
Deterring kickbacks and encouraging
            entry in public procurement markets : evidence from firm
            surveys in 88 developing countries
There is relatively little systematic
            evidence on the links between procurement systems and
            outcomes such as competition and corruption levels. This
            paper adds to the evidence base, using data on almost 34,000
            firms from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys, in 88
            countries that also have procurement systems data from
            Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA)
            assessments. The analysis finds that in countries with more
            transparent procurement systems, where exceptions to open
            competition in tendering must be explicitly justified, firms
            are more likely to participate in public procurement
            markets. Moreover, firms report paying fewer and smaller
            kickbacks to officials in countries with more transparent
            procurement systems, effective and independent complaint
            mechanisms, and more effective external auditing systems.
            These findings—particularly on kickbacks—are robust to the
            inclusion of many controls and to a range of sensitivity
            tests. The study finds evidence that better procurement
            systems matter more for smaller firms’ participation in
            procurement markets and payment of kickbacks to obtain
            contracts, consistent with the view that information and
            transactions costs that are incurred in learning about
            bidding opportunities and fulfilling bidding requirements
            are more onerous for smaller firms. Falsification tests show
            that other, non-procurement indicators from the PEFA
            assessments are not associated with procurement outcomes,
            and that the PEFA procurement indicators are not strongly
            associated with other “governance”-related outcomes in firm
            surveys that are unrelated to procurement.
A review of the anthropological
            literature on the civil service
This paper reviews anthropological
            literature on the topic of how and why civil services
            function as they do. The paper considers the formal and
            informal rules that structure bureaucratic practice,
            including the effects of institutional history or culture.
            The review examines how bureaucrats understand or experience
            their work, such as the rules that guide them; the clients,
            bosses, or employees with whom they interact; and their own
            actions. Finally, the review considers what methodological
            or ethical challenges are posed by the study of
            bureaucracies. The first section explores normative
            expectations of organizational practice and how they shape
            scholars’ accounts of the nature of bureaucratic power. The
            second section focuses on bureaucratic decision making,
            scrutinizing how institutional goals manifest in specific
            practices. The third section considers how sociocultural
            structures bear on bureaucratic practice, including the
            question of how organizational history and culture might
            complicate efforts at institutional reform. The fourth
            section engages with questions of knowledge production,
            ignorance, and indeterminacy, reviewing recent literature
            that questions the presumed role of bureaucracies and states
            as producers of knowledge. The fifth section explores the
            conceptual and practical methodological challenges faced by
            field researchers at institutions, and points toward key
            areas for future research.
Full-time teachers, students, and
            curriculum : the single-shift model in Rio de Janeiro
This paper examines the full-time school
            program in Rio de Janeiro's municipal schools. The
            program, called as the "Single-Shift" schools
            (Turno Unico), extends the time students spend in municipal
            schools and seeks to improve the quality of education
            provision by creating a diverse curriculum for the use of
            the extra time in school. Unlike the model prevalent in most
            Brazilian public schools, in which the school day is divided
            in two shifts of four to five hours each, Single-Shift
            schools provide education in a format in which students
            attend a seven-hour daily shift. A subset of Single-Shift
            schools was certified when they included aspects such as
            having all teaching staff fully dedicated to a single
            school. Difference-in-differences estimates, including
            school and time fixed effects, as well as restrictive
            school-by-time controls, indicate sizable and robust
            positive results for the certified Single-Shift program in
            middle schools. The results indicate that just extending the
            school day does not grant positive impacts on student
            performance if it is not also coupled with a more
            comprehensive and careful consideration on how the
            additional school hours are used and organized, which
            requires a well-structured and integrated curriculum,
            teachers fully dedicated to one school, and focused teacher training.
Financial globalization and market
            volatility : an empirical appraisal
This paper computes a new financial
            globalization index for a large sample of countries for
            1992-2016. Unlike other measures, the financial
            globalization index corrects for the heteroscedasticity of
            global volatility. This leads to a downward adjustment of
            financial globalization trends for developed, emerging, and
            frontier markets. The paper also shows that financial
            globalization reduces market volatility (measured by the
            volatility of stock returns) in tranquil times, and
            increases it in turbulent ones. On average, the first effect
            dominates, so that financial globalization leads to a
            decrease in market volatility, which is more pronounced in
            frontier markets.
Job fairs : matching firms and
            workers in a field experiment in Ethiopia
Do matching frictions affect youth
            employment in developing countries? This paper studies a
            randomized controlled trial of job fairs in Addis Ababa,
            Ethiopia. The job fairs match firms with a representative
            sample of young, educated job-seekers. The meetings at the
            fairs create very few jobs: one for approximately 10 firms
            that attended. The paper explores reasons for this, and
            finds significant evidence for mismatched expectations:
            about wages, about firms' requirements, and the average
            quality of job-seekers. There is evidence of learning and
            updating of beliefs in the aftermath of the fair. This
            changes behavior: both workers and firms invest more in
            formal job search after the fairs.
Soft skills for hard constraints :
            evidence from high-achieving female farmers
This paper documents the positive link
            between the noncognitive skills of women farmers and the
            adoption of a cash crop. The context is Malawi, one of the
            poorest countries in the world, where the majority of rural
            households practice subsistence farming. The analysis finds
            that a one standard deviation increase in noncognitive
            ability related to perseverance is associated with a five
            percentage point (or 33 percent) increase in the probability
            of adoption of the main cash crop. This link is not
            explained by differences across women in education and
            cognitive skills. It is also not explained by the fact that
            women with higher noncognitive ability tend to be married to
            husbands of higher noncognitive ability and education. The
            effect of female noncognitive skills on adoption is
            concentrated in patrilocal communities, where women face
            greater adversity and thus where it would be expected that
            the returns to such skills would be highest. One main
            channel through which noncognitive skills seem to work is
            through the use of productive inputs, including higher
            levels of labor, fertilizer, and agricultural advice services.
Rural non-farm employment and
            household welfare : evidence from Malawi
This paper uses nationally
            representative panel data and a combination of econometric
            approaches, to explore linkages between rural non-farm
            activities (wage and self-employment) and household welfare
            in rural Malawi. The paper analyzes the average treatment
            effects and distributional effects on participants'
            welfare indicators, such as households' per capita
            consumption expenditures. Then it investigates the effects
            of non-farm activities on the use of agricultural inputs,
            one channel through which non-farm employment might improve
            the welfare of rural households. Although participation in
            non-farm activities is not randomly assigned in the data,
            the identification strategy relies on fixed effects and
            correlated random effects estimation methods, dealing
            effectively with time invariant heterogeneity, coupled with
            geographical covariate adjustments, controlling for time
            varying differences in local market conditions and
            employment opportunities. The results suggest that non-farm
            wage employment and non-farm self-employment are welfare
            improving and poverty reducing. However, households at the
            lower tail of the wealth distribution benefit significantly
            less from participation than the wealthiest. Although the
            results support the promotion of the rural non-farm economy
            for poverty reduction purposes, they indicate that targeted
            interventions that improve poor households’ access to
            high-return non-farm opportunities are likely to lead to
            bigger successes in curbing rural poverty.
Multidimensional poverty in the
            Philippines, 2004-13 : do choices for weighting,
            identification and aggregation matter
Multidimensional poverty comparisons can
            be sensitive to the choice of welfare indicators, the
            weights assigned to the indicators, as well as the aggregate
            poverty measure used. This paper examines the robustness of
            trends in multidimensional poverty in the Philippines to
            these choices by presenting estimates for three alternative
            weighting schemes and three measures of multidimensional
            poverty. The weighting schemes range from uniform weights
            similar to those used in the global multidimensional poverty
            indexes produced by the United Nations Development
            Programme, to weights based on inverse incidence of
            different deprivations and those derived from the estimated
            relationship of deprivations to a survey-based measure of
            subjective welfare. The multidimensional poverty measures
            similarly range from the "dual cut-off" indexes
            analogous to the United Nations Development Programme's
            global Multidimensional Poverty Index, to “union-based”
            indexes that count all deprivations, to indexes that are
            also responsive to the distribution of deprivations. Using
            data for 2004-13, the paper finds evidence of a significant
            decline in multidimensional poverty that is robust to these
            alternatives, although the magnitude of the decline in, and
            especially the dimensional contributions to, aggregate
            multidimensional poverty are quite sensitive to the
            alternatives considered.
Should emerging markets worry about
            U.S. monetary policy announcements
This paper analyzes the spillover
            effects of U.S. monetary policy announcements on emerging
            market economies since end-2008, the period coinciding with
            the use of unconventional policy measures. Monetary policy
            surprises are measured by changes in two-year Treasury
            yields in short windows of time around the Federal Reserve
            Board’s policy announcements. The analysis finds that U.S.
            monetary policy surprises have a significant impact on
            emerging economies' exchange rates, equity prices, and
            bond yields. The impact is larger for surprise tightening of
            policy than for surprise easing. The impact is
            disproportionately larger for large surprises, implying that
            emerging markets are relatively insulated from anticipated
            policy announcements. The spillover effects of policy
            announcements of other advanced economies, such as the euro
            area, Japan, and United Kingdom, are found to be much weaker
            than those of the United States.
Heterogeneous effects of rural
            electrification: evidence from Bangladesh
Achieving universal access to
            electricity is one of the most important energy policy goals
            set by governments in the developing world. The recent
            empirical literature, however, paints a mixed picture about
            the economic viability of rural electrification. Although
            many studies find substantial socioeconomic benefits from
            rural electrification, others propose that these benefits
            are overstated. This paper examines the hypothesis that the
            magnitude and the nature of benefits associated with
            electrification are highly context dependent. Using a panel
            data of 7,018 rural households in Bangladesh for 2005 and
            2010, the paper explores two underlying determinants of the
            heterogeneity: the quality of electricity supply and the
            number of years of being connected to the grid.  The
            analysis uses an instrumental variable and
            propensity-score-weighed fixed-effects model to address
            potential endogeneity of electricity adoption. The analysis
            finds that power outages have a negative impact on almost
            all development outcomes considered, while some benefits of
            electrification accrue only over the long run. The overall
            gain from expanding access to and improving reliability of
            electricity supply in Bangladesh is estimated to be US$2.3
            billion a year.
Scaling up distributed solar in
            emerging markets : the case of the Arab Republic of Egypt
Like many emerging markets, the Arab
            Republic of Egypt is keen to promote distributed solar,
            defined here as systems below 500 kilowatts, but has
            struggled to create conditions for growth in the sector. The
            aim of this paper is to identify policy actions to unlock
            the distributed solar market for on-grid and off-grid
            applications, using Egypt as a case study. The paper
            calculates the rate of return on investment for different
            distributed solar applications, identifies nonfinancial
            barriers to scaling up distributed solar, and derives policy
            implications. For on-grid applications, the analysis finds
            that neither net metering nor the feed-in tariff makes
            distributed solar financially attractive, despite recent
            reductions in electricity subsidies and adjustments of
            feed-in tariff levels in October 2016. For off-grid
            applications, the profitability of distributed solar depends
            highly on the local price of diesel: distributed solar is
            viable only in areas where diesel is not available at the
            official (subsidized) price. In addition, several
            nonfinancial barriers limit the scalability of the
            distributed solar market. These findings indicate that the
            distributed solar market in Egypt will remain a niche market
            in the next few years without strengthened government
            support. First, for on-grid applications, the net metering
            scheme should be kept in place until a bankable feed-in
            tariff has been established. Second, for off-grid
            applications, the government should explore interventions to
            unlock opportunities in the agriculture and tourism sectors.
            Third, the government should strengthen private-sector
            activity in the sector, including by addressing nonfinancial
            barriers, such as transaction costs and gaps in the
            availability of data, and by building capacity among users,
            suppliers, and financial institutions.
Employment multipliers over the
            business cycle
This paper estimates dynamic employment
            multipliers in a U.S. county during 1998-2015. On average,
            one exogenous tradable job gain creates 1.1 jobs in the rest
            of the county economy in the same year, but is offset by
            losses of 0.23 job one year later and 0.32 job two years
            later. The multiplier is modest during the 2002-2007 boom
            and is large during the Great Recession. It is smaller in
            the initial years of the Recovery but is larger in the
            latter years. Uncertainty and credit constraints are two
            possible hindrances to the propagation of job gains during
            the Recovery.