rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The Intergenerational Mortality
            Tradeoff of COVID-19 Lockdown Policies
In lower-income countries, the economic
            contractions that accompany lockdowns to contain the spread
            of COVID-19  can increase child mortality, counteracting the
            mortality reductions achieved by the lockdown. To formalize
            and quantify this effect, this paper builds a
            macro-susceptible-infected-recovered model that features
            heterogeneous agents and a country-group-specific
            relationship between economic downturns and child mortality,
            and calibrate it to data for 85 countries across all income
            levels. The findings show that in low-income countries, a
            lockdown can potentially lead to 1.76 children's lives
            lost due to the economic contraction per COVID-19 fatality
            averted. The ratio stands at 0.59 and 0.06 in lower-middle
            and upper-middle income countries, respectively. As a
            result, in some countries lockdowns can actually produce net
            increases in mortality. In contrast, the optimal lockdown
            that maximizes the present value of aggregate social welfare
            is shorter and milder in poorer countries than in rich ones,
            and never produces a net mortality increase.
Robots and Export Quality
Robots are rapidly becoming a key part
            of manufacturing in developed and emerging economies. This
            paper examines a new channel for how automation can affect
            international trade: quality upgrading. Automation can
            reduce production errors, particularly of repetitive
            processes, leading to higher quality products. The effects
            of robot use on export quality are estimated, by combining
            cross-country and cross-industry data on industrial robots
            with detailed Harmonized System 10-digit trade data. Robot
            diffusion in (preexisting) foreign customers is used as an
            instrumental variable to predict robot adoption in the home
            country-industry. The findings show that robot diffusion
            leads to increases in the quality of exported products.
            Quality improvements are predominantly driven by the
            upgrading of developing country exports; and within
            countries, quality improvements are driven by upgrading of
            (initially) lower-quality exports of developed and
            developing countries. The paper also finds some differences
            in the type of robots—sophisticated or more basic—associated
            with quality gains in developing and developed economies.
Gender Dimensions of COVID-19
            Economic Impact in Chad : Insights from a CGE Model and
            Household Phone Survey
This paper uses computable general
            equilibrium model-based simulations to assess the gender
            dimensions of the impact of COVID-19 on economic outcomes,
            that is, labor force participation, employment, wages, and
            earnings. It leverages the 2020 High-Frequency Phone Survey
            in Chad to assess the impact of COVID-19 on female-headed
            households, which comprise 23 percent of the country’s
            households. The findings show that the COVID-19 pandemic
            will have a disproportionately higher negative impact on
            women in urban areas. The simulation results suggest that
            more women than men working in paid jobs might lose their
            jobs. Although the paper focuses on the impact of COVID-19
            in 2020, the findings can be generalized as the hysteresis
            effects might be deeper and more prolonged if the pandemic
            is more prolonged. The situation is potentially dire,
            especially in service sectors, where most women are employed
            in urban areas. Moreover, the High-Frequency Phone Survey
            shows that COVID-19 has notably impacted the households’
            income from enterprises and suggests that this negative
            impact is more prevalent for female-headed households.
            Although male- and female-headed households are using common
            coping strategies during the pandemic, female-headed
            households in rural and urban areas have been more reliant
            on aid from family and friends and less reliant on savings,
            credit, or the sale of assets.
Using Registry Data to Assess
            Gender-Differentiated Land and Credit Market Effects of
            Urban Land Policy Reform : Evidence from Lesotho
Since 2010, Lesotho has implemented
            legal and institutional changes to allow female land
            ownership, established a new land agency, reduced the cost
            of registering land, and carried out systematic urban land
            titling. Analysis using administrative data shows that these
            reforms triggered discontinuous and sustained changes in
            quality of service delivery, female land ownership, and
            registered land sales and mortgage volume. Land and credit
            market activation is, however, exclusively due to policy
            reforms. While (subsidized) systematic land registration
            allows women to access documented land rights, these effects
            may not be sustained without further regulatory change,
            highlighting the importance of reducing fees and
            streamlining processes to improve urban land and financial
            market functioning as a key precondition for Africa’s
            expected wave of urbanization translating into productive
            cities and jobs.
Scalable Early Warning Systems for
            School Dropout Prevention : Evidence from a 4.000-School
            Randomized Controlled Trial
Across many low- and middle-income
            countries, a sizable share of young people drop out of
            school before completing a full course of basic education.
            Early warning systems that accurately identify students at
            risk of dropout and support them with targeted interventions
            have shown results and are in widespread use in high-income
            contexts. This paper presents impact evaluation results from
            an early warning system pilot program in Guatemala, a
            middle-income country where nearly 40 percent of sixth
            graders drop out before completing ninth grade. The pilot
            program, which was implemented in 17 percent of Guatemala’s
            primary schools and largely leveraging existing government
            resources, reduced the dropout rate in the transition from
            primary to lower secondary school by 4 percent (1.3
            percentage points) among schools assigned to the program,
            and by 9 percent (3 percentage points) among program
            compliers. Although the effect size is relatively modest,
            the low cost of the program (estimated at less than US$3 per
            student) and successful implementation at scale make this a
            promising and cost-effective approach for reducing dropout
            in resource-constrained contexts like Guatemala.
Information, Loss Framing, and
            Spillovers in Pay-for-Performance Contracts
Do incentives matter beyond the
            information conveyed by pay-for-performance contracts? Does
            loss framing matter? And do incomplete contracts generate
            spillovers on unincentivized tasks? This study reports on a
            framed field experiment with 1,363 maternity care workers in
            691 primary health facilities in Nigeria to answer these
            questions. Participants were randomized into three study
            arms—(1) information with a flat participation fee, (2)
            performance-based rewards, and (3) performance-based
            penalties. In each arm, participants had to identify correct
            clinical actions based on the records of hypothetical
            patients receiving maternity care. Five of fifteen possible
            actions were incentivized but performance was measured on
            all fifteen. Compared to information alone, both rewards and
            penalties increase time on task by 11 percent, correct
            overall performance by 6 to 8 percent, and directly
            incentivized performance by 20 percent. Incentives also
            generate positive spillovers of 14 percent on unincentivized
            tasks. Loss framing does not affect performance. Results
            suggest that improving health worker effort by 8 percent
            would have an impact on neonatal mortality at par with the
            short run effect of adding a physician to a health facility.
            Finally, findings show that a small incentive captures most
            of the impact, implying that incentives work by making
            information more effective and that pay-for-performance
            contracts can be made significantly more cost-effective.
Public Work Programs and
            Gender-Based Violence : Evidence from Lao PDR
Public workfare programs targeted at
            women have the potential to empower them economically by
            providing jobs. However, the impact of public workfare
            programs on gender-based violence is theoretically
            ambiguous. They may contribute to its reduction through
            lowering financial stress or improving a woman’s bargaining
            position due to independent income. Yet, a woman’s higher
            income may also create incentives to use violence for
            extractive purposes; putting women in a position of provider
            at home and in male dominated sectors outside the home may
            create a backlash because these positions violate gender
            norms. Working outside the home could reduce exposure to an
            abusive spouse, but it may increase harassment or assault
            outside the household. This paper analyzes the impacts of a
            public workfare program in the Lao People’s Democratic
            Republic, a lower-middle-income Asian country, where the
            government randomized implementation of a public workfare
            program targeted at rural women who received an average
            payment of US$550 over 18 months. The findings show that the
            program was successful in increasing female income, but it
            did not change women’s experience of gender-based violence:
            comparing program participants and control group women,
            there is no differences in self-reports of intimate partner
            violence (controlling behavior, emotional violence, or
            physical violence), violence from other members of the
            household, or violence from perpetrators outside the
            household. Some design aspects of this particular program
            may have resulted in the lack of impacts on gender-based
            violence. Changes in the design and implementation of public
            workfare programs are needed for them to work as a mechanism
            to reduce gender-based violence.
Incentivizing Conservation of de
            facto Community-Owned Forests
Payments for environmental services are
            a nature conservation policy in which landowners receive
            financial compensation conditional on verified environmental
            service delivery. Contracts for payments for environmental
            services have been found to be effective in inducing
            conservation on private lands, but they may give rise to
            strong free-riding incentives when implemented on lands that
            are, de facto or de jure, commonly owned. This study
            implemented a randomized controlled trial in arid Burkina
            Faso to test the relative effectiveness of two collective
            payment for environmental services schemes in inducing
            forest conservation—a linear group payment scheme, in which
            group payments increase linearly with tree survival rates,
            and a threshold group payment scheme. The extant theory
            predicts that the latter incentive mechanism will (weakly)
            outperform the former. This paper develops a new theory that
            shows that the reverse may also hold—but only if the
            relationship between effort and tree survival rates is very
            uncertain. The findings show that threshold group payments
            increase intermediate measures of cooperation,
            but—consistent with Burkina Faso’s harsh conditions
            rendering tree survival quite stochastic—actual survival
            rates are higher with the linear group payments. The paper
            presents field experimental evidence as well as lab
            experimental results to explore the mechanisms giving rise
            to these results.
Incentivizing Carbon Taxation in
            Low-Income Countries : Tax Rebating versus Carbon Crediting
Border carbon adjustments imply that
            high-income countries set taxes on energy-intensive imports
            that are proportional to the carbon content of these
            imports, to match their own carbon taxes. This paper
            considers the impacts of such a policy on exporter
            countries, many of which have no or very low carbon taxes
            today. The paper first studies a policy whereby the importer
            allows the exporter’s border tax to be reduced by its own
            comprehensive carbon tax (“tax rebating”). The analysis
            finds that the exporter is then incentivized to set its own
            comprehensive carbon tax at the same rate as the border tax,
            up to a maximal rate. When the border tax is higher, the
            exporter instead reduces its carbon tax. Border tax revenues
            of the high-income country can be returned to incentivize
            higher carbon taxes in the exporting countries (“carbon
            crediting”). When tax rebating is not allowed but tax
            revenues are fully returned, even higher exporter carbon
            taxes can then be incentivized, possibly exceeding $60 per
            ton of carbon dioxide in the numerical examples. Border
            taxation can give rise to export diversion away from border
            tax-setting countries, which reduces the scope for
            incentivizing the exporter’s carbon tax. The paper also
            studies how taxes on oil extraction by oil exporters can be
            incentivized by oil importing countries, by increasing their
            oil import prices above world market rates, or more
            efficiently through support to investments in exporters’
            renewable energy capacity.
Does Title Increase Large Farm
            Productivity Institutional Determinants of Large Land-Based
            Investments’ Performance in Zambia
The importance of well-functioning land
            markets for structural transformation via labor movements to
            the non-agricultural sector, growth in farm size, and the
            ability to use land as collateral for credit and has long
            motivated Government efforts at reducing the transaction
            costs of registering and transferring land and supporting
            large farm formation. Rigorous evidence on the effect of
            such measures has, however, been scant. This paper explores
            the impact of institutional arrangements on productivity for
            a representative sample of 3,000 large farms in Zambia, one
            of the earliest African adopters of such policies to close
            this gap. Instrumental-variable (IV) regressions suggest
            title has no effect on productivity, investment, or credit
            access and reduces rather than improves rental market
            participation. Measures to harness Zambia’s potential
            include improving title quality through exclusive use of
            digital registries; imposition of a land tax on state land
            to incentivize productive rather than speculative land use
            and cancel outdated legacy documents; and greater
            involvement of traditional authorities in record maintenance
            and land management, possibly via land tax revenue sharing.
Behavioral Insights in
            Infrastructure Sectors : A Survey
In the past two decades, insights from
            behavioral sciences, particularly behavioral economics, have
            been widely applied in the design of social programs such as
            pensions, social security, and taxation. This paper provides
            a survey of the existing literature in economics on the
            application of behavioral insights to infrastructure
            sectors, focusing on water and energy. Various applications
            of behavioral insights in the literature are examined from
            the perspectives of the three main actors in the
            infrastructure sectors: policy makers, service providers,
            and consumers. Evidence is presented from the literature on
            how behavioral regularities, such as imperfect optimization,
            limited self-control, and nonstandard preferences, affect
            the strategies, decisions, and actions of policy makers,
            service providers, and consumers, often leading to
            suboptimal outcomes for service investment, delivery,
            access, and use. The paper also highlights how behavioral
            interventions such as anchoring, framing, nonpecuniary
            incentives, and altering the choice architecture can lead to
            improvements in performance, adoption, consumption, and
            other outcomes of interest in the infrastructure sectors.
The Falling Price of Cement in Africa
Prices for several intermediate inputs,
            including cement, are higher in developing
            economies—particularly in Africa. Combining data from the
            International Comparison Program with a global directory of
            cement plants we estimate an industry equilibrium model to
            distinguish between drivers of international price
            dispersion: demand, costs, conduct, and entry. Developing
            economies feature both higher marginal costs and higher
            markups. African markets are not characterized by higher
            barriers to entry and, if anything, feature relatively more
            competitive conduct. The small size of many national
            markets, however, limits entry and competition and explains
            most of the higher markups. Policy implications are discussed.
Intergenerational Mobility around
            the World
Using individual data from over 400
            surveys, this paper compiles a global database of
            intergenerational mobility in education for 153 countries
            covering 97 percent of the world’s population. For 87
            percent of the world’s population, it provides trends in
            intergenerational mobility for individuals born between 1950
            to 1989. The findings show that absolute mobility in
            education—the share of respondents that obtains higher
            levels of education than their parents—is higher in the
            developed world despite the higher levels of parental
            educational attainment. Relative mobility—measuring the
            degree of independence between parent and child years of
            schooling—is also found to be greater in the developed
            world. Together, these findings point to severe challenges
            in intergenerational mobility in the poorest parts of the
            world. Beyond national income levels, the paper explores the
            correlation between intergenerational mobility and a variety
            of country characteristics. Countries with higher rates of
            mobility have (i) higher tax revenues and rates of
            government expenditures, especially on education; (ii)
            better child health indicators (less stunting and lower
            infant mortality); (iii) higher school quality (more
            teachers per pupil and fewer school dropouts); and (iv) less
            residential segregation.
Would Mexican Migrants be Willing to
            Guarantee Americans a Basic Income
The paper simulates a double-sided
            competitive market in temporary work permits between the
            U.S. and Mexico. Eligible working-age Americans would have
            the option of renting out their implicit work permits while
            Mexican workers have remunerative new opportunities. With
            plausible allowances for migration costs, the market can
            support a self-financed and self-targeted basic income for
            Americans and lower their poverty rate. With sufficiently
            high tax rates on work permits, the scheme can be managed to
            avoid a large increase in the count of total migrants
            compared to now. The likely change in the skill composition
            of migrants would raise U.S. GDP.
Carbon Tax in an Economy with
            Informality : A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis for
            Cote d’Ivoire
In an economy with substantial
            informality, a carbon tax can produce fiscal co-benefits
            that improve economic performance in addition to reducing
            carbon dioxide emissions. If the carbon tax revenues are
            used to cut production or labor taxes on formal firms,
            particularly those not in the energy sector, the cost of
            imposing the carbon tax is reduced, and there may even be
            net economic benefits.  These tax cuts can also provide an
            incentive for informal firms to move to formal parts of the
            economy. This study confirms these hypotheses using a
            computable general equilibrium model for Côte d’Ivoire.
            However, the scale and even the sign of overall economic
            impacts and formal-informal sectoral interactions are
            sensitive to the scheme and scale of revenue recycling. The
            largest fiscal co-benefits, in terms of gross domestic
            product and economic welfare gains, would occur when the
            entire carbon tax revenue, after keeping the government
            revenue neutral, is used to cut existing labor or production
            taxes for non-energy formal firms.  Reducing the existing
            value-added tax also increases gross domestic product and
            economic welfare, but without reducing the informality. The
            study also shows that energy producers should be exempted
            from using the carbon tax revenues to cut their production
            or labor taxes; otherwise, carbon dioxide reduction
            decreases due to a rebound effect. Although a carbon tax
            with lump-sum transfers of revenues is progressive, it would
            be economically inefficient because of gross domestic
            product and welfare reduction and lack of incentives to
            encourage informal activities to move to the formal parts of
            the economy.
Carbon Tax in an Economy with
            Informality : A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis for
            Cote d’Ivoire
Policy Research Working Paper 9710 Carbon Tax in an Economy with Informality A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis for Côte d’Ivoire _Govinda Timilsina Yazid Dissou Mike Toman Dirk Heine_ Development Economics Development Research Group June 2021