rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Agricultural markets in Benin and
            Malawi : the operation and performance of traders
Drawing on original surveys of
            agricultural traders, the authors examine how traders
            operate in two Sub-Saharan African countries, Benin and
            Malawi. They find the following: The largest transaction
            costs for traders are search and transport. Search methods
            rely principally on personal visits by the trader, which
            raises search costs. And since enterprises are very small,
            transport represents a large share of marketing costs. Brand
            recognition, grading, and quality certification are
            nonexistent. Brokers and agents are not organized in
            commodity exchanges. Quantities are not pooled for transport
            and storage so as to achieve returns to scale. Interseasonal
            and interregional arbitrage is not feasible for most
            traders, who prefer to operate day to day in a small
            territory. This information provides some important insights
            into how agricultural trade could be improved. It suggests
            possible policy interventions in four main areas: increasing
            traders' asset base, reducing transaction risk,
            promoting more sophisticated business practices, and
            reducing physical marketing costs.
Are men benefiting from the new
            economy : male economic marginalization in Argentina,
            Brazil, and Costa Rica
The economies of Latin America have
            undergone extensive reforms, raising concerns about how
            these changes have affected the labor market. But there is
            also increasing concern that the reforms may have deeper
            social ramifications as the new economies strain the ability
            of certain groups of men to work and to earn good wages,
            fulfilling their traditional role as providers. Using
            household surveys broadly covering the period 1988-97 in
            urban areas of Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica, Arias
            examines the patterns of unemployment and real wage growth
            for distinct groups of male workers to see whether there is
            evidence of a deterioration in men's ability to be
            economically self-sufficient. He finds no general trend of
            male economic marginalization. The incidence and duration of
            unemployment have increased the most for the typically
            vulnerable group-young, less educated, informal sector
            workers-but the increased duration of unemployment has also
            affected older and more educated men. With respect to wages,
            density and quantile regression analysis indicates that the
            usual stories of wage marginalization of vulnerable workers
            can hardly explain the observed variety of wage growth
            patterns in the three countries. The positive wage
            performance has been concentrated mainly in the higher
            quantiles of the conditional wage distribution. This
            suggests that differences in unobservable worker
            characteristics, such as industriousness, labor market
            connections, and quality of schooling, have been key
            determinants of the ability of male workers in the region to
            adapt to economic restructuring. These results suggest that
            assistance should be targeted to some groups so that
            frustrations in asserting an economic identity do not lead
            to aggressive behavior. But they also show that we must look
            elsewhere for the roots of the increase in socially
            dysfunctional behavior.
Female wage inequality in Latin
            American labor markets
The author uses quantile regression to
            document the evolution of the earnings structure of salaried
            and self-employed female workers in urban areas in three
            Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, and Costa
            Rica-after structural reforms were introduced. The analysis
            covers pre- and post-reform years: in Argentina, 1988 and
            1997, and in Brazil and Costa Rica, 1989 and 1995. Four
            primary results emerge from the analysis: 1) After other
            characteristics are controlled for, wage premiums to human
            capital, labor experience, and other characteristics vary
            along the conditional distribution. This indicates that a
            homoscedastic model is not suitable for analyzing wage
            differentials among working women in these countries. 2)
            Wage inequality among women fell in the self-employment
            sector in all three countries. In the salaried sector
            results were mixed, with wage inequality declining in
            Argentina but increasing slightly in Costa Rica. 3) The
            decline in female wage inequality can be explained in part
            by changes in the premium to education. Results indicate
            that the relative premium to education fell in Argentina and
            Brazil-that is, the adjusted wage differential between more
            educated and less educated women decreased between the
            sampled years in these countries. In contrast, wage
            differentials arising from education increased in Costa
            Rica. 4) Women earning less than their characteristics would
            predict seemed to fare well with the economic opening:
            domestic workers, nonwhite workers, and the least educated
            in the lower quantiles saw their wage premiums increase
            relative to those of the control groups. These results are
            consistent with the predictions of the Heckscher-Ohlin
            theory of trade liberalization: those with less human
            capital saw wage gains relative to those with more human capital.
Children's work and schooling -
            does gender matter : evidence from the Peru LSMS panel data
Using panel data from Peru, the author
            investigates the determinants of the allocation of
            boys' and girls' time to schooling, housework, and
            income-generating activities. Specifically, she explores
            whether sickness, female headship, access to infrastructure,
            and employment of women in the household have different
            impacts on the time use of boys and girls. Girls mostly
            engage in housework, and boys mostly work outside the home.
            As a work activity, housework responds to economic
            incentives and constraints. The author's econometric
            findings suggest that changes in household welfare affect
            girls' work and schooling more than boys'. Even
            though boys' and girls' educational attainment
            rates are the same, girls' education responds more to
            changes in household welfare than does boys'.
            Similarly, girls are more likely than boys to adjust their
            home time in response to changes in adult female employment
            and to sickness of household members. Lack of access to
            energy infrastructure lowers the educational attainment of
            both boys and girls but has little affect on their labor.
            The traditional approach to the determinants of child labor
            and education excludes housework and may understate
            children's time use, particularly that of girls. It may
            therefore also overlook an important gender dimension of
            education policy. Safety nets that protect household incomes
            from employment shocks and sickness, and childcare programs
            that allow women to work, would reduce the likelihood of
            girls being pulled out of school.
Breadwinner or caregiver - how
            household role affects labor choices in Mexico
Recent volatility in the Mexican
            economy, has required households to alter patterns of
            participation in the labor force, voluntarily or not. The
            author uses panel data to examine patterns of labor force
            entry among adult men, and women with different household
            responsibilities, asking whether gender is a primary
            determinant, shaping these patterns. She finds that labor
            supply patterns are driven more by household role, than by
            gender. Heads of households, regardless of sex, behave
            similarly. Women who have neither spouses, nor children
            behave more like men, than like married women. They are also
            more likely than any other group to have inflexible,
            higher-paying jobs in the formal sector - which raises the
            question: Do employers discriminate, based on gender, or on
            household structure? She also detects a strong added-worker
            effect among secondary workers, a result not detected in the
            labor markets of developed countries that have social
            insurance programs. Finally she finds that wives'
            choice of sector during downturns, is subject to the
            households' earning needs, that husbands use informal
            wage, or contract employment as an employer of last resort,
            only in response to negative income shocks to the household,
            and that single mothers do not select the informal sector
            over the formal sector in response to either expected, or
            realized negative income shocks. The policy implications?
            Interventions that target women aren't necessarily
            appropriate, because women are heterogeneous. And programs
            that aid household heads - male or female - should be
            directed toward employment that will last beyond the
            economic shock.
Loan loss provisioning and economic
            slowdowns : too much, too late
Only recently has the debate on bank
            capital regulation devoted specific attention to the role
            that bank loan loss provisions can play as part of a minimum
            capital regulatory framework. Several national regulators
            have adopted or are planning to introduce a cyclically
            adjustable requirement for loan loss provisions, and the
            Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is considering how to
            provide adequate treatment to provisioning practices within
            a broad bank capital regulatory framework. The authors
            contribute to the ongoing debate by exploring the available
            evidence about bank provisioning practices around the world.
            They find that in the vast majority of cases banks tend to
            delay provisioning for bad loans until it is too late-when
            cyclical downturns have already set in-possibly magnifying
            the impact of the economic cycle on the income and capital
            of banks. Notwithstanding the considerable variation in the
            patterns followed by banks around the world, Laeven and
            Majnoni find that the size and timing of provisions tend to
            improve with the level of economic development.
Contractual savings institutions and
            banks' stability and efficiency
The authors analyze the relationship
            between the development of contractual savings institutions
            and banks' efficiency, credit, and liquidity risks.
            They discuss the potential mechanisms through which the
            development of contractual savings institutions may affect
            the banking sector. They show that the development of
            contractual savings institutions has a significant impact on
            bank spreads and loan maturity. After controlling for
            banks' characteristics, macroeconomic factors, and more
            standard indicators of financial development, they show that
            the development of contractual savings institutions is
            associated with increased efficiency of the banking system
            and greater resilience to credit and liquidity risks.
Unemployment, skills, and incentives
            - an overview of the safety net system in the Slovak Republic
The author studies the potential
            disincentive effects of unemployment insurance, and social
            assistance payments on the duration of unemployment in the
            Slovak Republic. For this purpose, she uses new, very
            detailed data on receipt of benefits from the Unemployment
            Registry (1990-2000) and the Labor Force Survey (1996, 1999,
            and 2000). She employs a flexible methodology that makes it
            possible to identify behavioral changes that may occur as
            the quantity, and duration of the benefits change over time,
            as well as behavioral differences between recipients, and
            non-recipients. This approach, she argues, constitutes a
            more accurate test for the presence of incentive, and
            disincentive effects, than those presented before in the
            literature. She expands the scope of her analysis, to study
            the effect of receiving benefits on several outcomes in
            addition to exit from unemployment (for example, job seeking
            behavior, and duration of unemployment). She finds important
            behavioral differences between those who receive benefits,
            and those who do not. Recipients tend to spend more time
            unemployed, but they also look for employment more actively
            than their counterparts, have more demanding preferences
            with respected to their future jobs, and find jobs in the
            private sector more often. In addition, these jobs turn out
            to be better matches than those obtained by non-recipients
            (with the quality of the match measured by its duration).
            Moreover, the behavior of recipients varies tremendously
            depending on whether they are actually receiving benefits,
            or not. Once their benefits are exhausted, they exit the
            Unemployment Registry at a higher rate, search more
            actively, and move into private sector jobs more often. So
            when these workers are used as their own control group,
            there is strong evidence that both unemployment insurance
            and social assistance, or support have important
            disincentive effects, not only on the duration of
            unemployment, but also on job seeking behavior, and on exit
            to employment. Analyzing the effect of unemployment
            insurance, and social assistance on poverty, the author
            concludes that these programs bear most of the burden in the
            fight against poverty. But this protection does not come
            free, since significant disincentive effects are associated
            with receiving benefits. Thus any reform plan should take
            into account both of these aspects of the programs, along
            with the government's goals for the programs.
Incomplete enforcement of pollution
            regulation : bargaining power of Chinese factories
Only a small number of studies have
            empirically examined the determinants of the monitoring and
            enforcement performed by environmental regulators, and most
            of these have focused on industrial countries. In contrast,
            the authors empirically examine the determinants of
            enforcement in China. More precisely, they analyze the
            determinants of firms' relative bargaining power with
            local environmental authorities with respect to the
            enforcement of pollution charges. The authors show that
            private sector firms appear to have less bargaining power
            than state-owned enterprises. Contrary to earlier findings,
            they also show that firms facing adverse financial
            situations have more bargaining power than other firms and
            are more likely to pay smaller pollution charges than they
            should be paying. Finally, the authors show that the greater
            the social impact of a firm's emissions (as measured by
            complaints), the less bargaining power it has with local
            environmental authorities.
Inequality, the price of
            nontradables, and the real exchange rate : theory and
            cross-country evidence
The author provides theoretical and
            empirical evidence of a negative association between income
            inequality and real exchange rates. First, he builds a
            theoretical model showing the transmission mechanism from
            inequality to real exchange rates. Second, using
            cross-country data, he demonstrates that the theoretical
            argument has empirical support. The association is large,
            significant, and robust to alternative specifications of the
            reduced form model and estimation methodologies. These
            findings provide empirical support for Poverty Reduction
            Strategy Papers, government strategies agreed on with the
            World Bank that hinge on four major objectives: accelerating
            equity-based growth, guaranteeing access to basic social
            services for the poor, expanding opportunities for
            employment and income-generating activities for the poor,
            and promoting good governance. The author's analysis
            indicates that "equity-based growth" and
            "export-driven growth" are compatible policy
            goals. But the negative relationship between inequality and
            real exchange rates does not imply that policies aimed at
            dramatic redistribution will automatically lead to real
            depreciation of the domestic currency, improve the external
            balance, and accelerate economic growth.
Product quality, productive
            efficiency, and international technology diffusion :
            evidence from plant-level panel data
What mechanisms most frequently transmit
            foreign technologies to developing country firms? Do these
            foreign technologies affect both productive efficiency and
            product quality in the recipient firms? Under what
            circumstances do firms pursue activities that give them
            access to foreign knowledge? To address these questions, the
            authors develop a new methodology and apply the framework to
            plant-level panel data from Colombia, Mexico, and Morocco.
            Their results point to several basic messages. First, by
            imposing enough structure on the production function and the
            demand system, it is possible to measure product quality and
            marginal costs at the plant level and to relate the
            evolution of these variables to firms' activity
            histories. Doing so, the authors find strong firm-level
            persistence in both quality and marginal costs. But in most
            industry or country panels that they study, past
            international activities help little in predicting current
            performance once past realizations on quality and marginal
            cost are controlled for. That is, activities do not
            typically Granger-cause performance. Interestingly, in the
            minority of cases where significant associations emerge,
            international activities appear to move costs and product
            quality in the same direction. So the net effect on profits
            in these cases is not immediately apparent. Second, several
            basic patterns emerge with respect to the determinants of
            international activities. Most fundamentally, activities are
            highly persistent, even after unobserved heterogeneity is
            controlled for. That suggests that firms incur sunk
            threshold costs when they initiate or cease activities, so
            temporary policy or macroeconomic shocks may have long-run
            effects on the patterns of activities observed in a
            particular country or industry. Also, activities tend to go
            together, so that studies that relate firms'
            performance to one international activity and ignore the
            others may generate misleading conclusions. But the bundling
            of activities seems to mainly reflect unobserved plant
            characteristics, such as managerial philosophy, contacts,
            product niche, and location. Once these are controlled for,
            there is little evidence that engaging in one international
            activity increases the probability that a firm will engage
            in others in the future.
Bank lending to small businesses in
            Latin America : does Bank origin matter
In recent years foreign bank
            participation has increased tremendously in Latin America.
            Some observers argue that foreign bank entry will benefit
            Latin American banking systems by reducing the volatility of
            loans and deposits and increasing efficiency. Others are
            concerned that foreign banks might choose to extend credit
            only to certain customers, leaving some sectors-such as
            small businesses-unserved. The authors examine this issue.
            Using bank-level data for Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and
            Peru during the mid-1990s, they empirically investigate
            whether bank origin affects the share and growth rate of
            bank lending to small businesses. They find that although
            foreign banks generally lent less to small businesses (as
            share of total lending) than private domestic banks, the
            difference is due primarily to the behavior of small foreign
            banks. The difference was considerably smaller for large and
            medium-sized banks. And in Chile and Colombia, large foreign
            banks might actually lend slightly more (as share of total
            lending) than large domestic banks.
The (positive) effect of
            macroeconomic crises on the schooling and employment
            decisions of children in a middle-income country
The impact of macroeconomic crises on
            parents' investments in the human capital of their
            children is a widely contested issue. The author analyzes
            the effects of the profound macroeconomic crisis in Peru in
            1988-92 on the schooling and employment decisions made by
            urban school-age children. He arrives at two basic findings:
            First, the crisis had no effect on the attendance rates of
            school-age children. But the share of children who were both
            employed and in school fell significantly during the crisis.
            Second, mean educational attainment was significantly higher
            for children who were exposed to the crisis than for those
            who were not. THe author argues that these findings may be
            related: children who are not employed have more time
            available and may therefore put more effort into school. He
            concludes with a discussion of the implications of his
            findings for the design of appropriate social protection policies.