rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Effects of Recognition of Prior
            Learning on Job Market Outcomes : Impact Evaluation in Bangladesh
The recognition of prior learning
            provides opportunities for workers to have their skills
            assessed and certified. In many countries, recognition of
            prior learning is expected to broaden individuals’
            empowerment and economic opportunities. Using a randomized
            control trial method, this impact evaluation study aims to
            assess whether and to what extent assessment and
            certification of prior learning effectively improve economic
            and other job outcomes among assessment participants in
            Bangladesh. Five hundred applicants were randomly assigned
            to the treatment group and 500 applicants to the control
            group. The baseline survey took place in June 2018 and the
            end-line survey in January 2019. The findings indicate that
            assessment prior learning positively impacts workers’
            employment outcomes and quality of employment, including the
            chance of getting employed, wage levels, formality of
            employment, and workers’ confidence in their skills and
            jobs. The findings also suggest that women may benefit more
            than men from certificates of recognition of prior learning
            in Bangladesh. The transition analysis further supports the
            finding that recognition of prior learning facilitates the
            transition of unemployed or not-working workers into
            employment. Recognition of prior learning also increases the
            chances of finding work through formal job search channels
            and at formal and larger private companies. These findings
            align with the assumption and expectation behind the
            recognition of prior learning programs in the context of
            economic development. The participants in assessments and
            certification of prior learning had overwhelmingly positive
            opinions about them. The study has some limitations and
            suggestions for future research.
How Does Trade Respond to
            Anticipated Tariff Changes Evidence from NAFTA
Firms anticipate upcoming tariff changes
            by shifting their purchases to periods with lower costs.
            This paper shows that such anticipatory dynamics overstate
            the trade elasticity. Standard identification of the trade
            response to trade cost changes uses tariff variation from
            free trade agreements and assumes that trade flows equal
            their consumption. However, free trade agreements eliminate
            tariffs gradually through announced phaseouts. This allows
            firms to delay their purchases until tariff cuts are
            effective, while consuming their inventories. Indeed, during
            the North American Free Trade Agreement’s staged tariff
            reductions, imports experienced sizable anticipatory slumps
            followed by libseralization bumps. To study the behavior of
            consumed imports, a measure is constructed that uses
            inventory-to-sales ratios to smooth the trade flows. Its
            application to the data yields that the annual trade-flow
            elasticity is 56 percent larger than the trade-consumption
            response and that the ratio of the long- to short-run
            elasticity increases from 2.3 with trade flows to 3.4 with
            consumed imports. The measure is validated through Monte
            Carlo simulations of an (s,S) ordering model that reproduces
            the observed trade pattern.
Using Poverty Maps to Improve the
            Design of Household Surveys : The Evidence from Tunisia
This paper proposes a new method for
            improving the design effect of household surveys based on a
            two-stage design in which the first stage clusters, or
            primary selection units, are stratified along administrative
            boundaries. Improvement of the design effect can result in
            more precise survey estimates (smaller standard errors and
            confidence intervals) or reduction of the necessary sample
            size, that is, a reduction in the budget needed for a
            survey. The proposed method is based on the availability of
            a previously conducted poverty mapping, that is, spatial
            descriptions of the distribution of poverty, which are
            finely disaggregated in small geographic units, such as
            cities, municipalities, districts, or other administrative
            partitions of a country that are linked to primary selection
            units. Such information is then used to select primary
            selection units with systematic sampling by introducing
            further implicit stratification in the survey design, to
            maximize the improvement of the design effect. The proposed
            methodology has been implemented for the new 2021 Household
            Budget Survey in Tunisia, conducted under a cooperation
            project funded by the World Bank. The underlying poverty
            mapping is based on the 2015 Household Budget Survey and the
            2014 Population and Housing Census.
Heterogenous Teacher Effects of Two
            Incentive Schemes : Evidence from a Low-Income Country
This paper reports on a randomized
            evaluation of two teacher incentive programs, which were
            conducted in a nationally representative sample of 420
            public primary schools in Guinea. In 140 schools,
            high-performing teachers were rewarded in-kind, with the
            value of goods increasing with level of performance. In
            another 140 schools, high-performing teachers received a
            certificate and public recognition from the government.
            After one year, the in-kind program improved learning by
            0.24 standard deviations, while the recognition treatment
            had a smaller and statistically insignificant impact. After
            two years, the effect from the in-kind program was smaller
            (0.16 standard deviations) and not significant; the paper
            provides suggestive evidence that the reduction may be due
            to the onset of an Ebola outbreak. The effects of the
            recognition program remained small and insignificant. The
            effects differed by teacher gender: for female teachers,
            both programs were equally effective, while for male
            teachers, only the in-kind program led to statistically
            significant effects.
Automation and Manufacturing
            Performance in a Developing Country
This paper provides novel evidence on
            the economic impact of industrial automation in a large
            developing economy. It combines labor force survey and
            manufacturing plant-level data from Indonesia over 2008–15,
            when the country experienced a rapid increase in imports of
            robots. The findings show a positive impact of robots on
            various measures of plants’ performance and integration into
            global value chains. In contrast to existing evidence on
            advanced and emerging economies, these plant-level impacts
            result in an increase in manufacturing and services
            employment at the local level. Such employment effects are
            consistent with evidence of positive employment spillovers
            from downstream robot-adopting plants, which help extend the
            benefits of automation to non-adopting plants. The spillover
            effects may provide a rationale to incentivize manufacturing
            firms to adopt industrial robots. The results also suggest
            that the gains from automation are not equally shared:
            adoption of robots is associated with a reduction in the
            labor share in value added and an increase in skill wage premia.
Gain without Pain Non-Tariff
            Measures, Plants’ Productivity and Markups
This paper studies how productivity and
            markups respond to non-tariff measures. The analysis uses a
            novel time-varying data set on all non-tariff measures
            applied to imported products by Indonesia. Price and
            quantity information is used to disentangle the impact of
            non-tariff measures on plants’ technical efficiency and
            markups. The findings show that on average, non-tariff
            measures generate fewer distortions than import tariffs do.
            However, while specific non-tariff measures increase the
            quality of the products on which they are applied, others
            act as barriers to trade similar to import tariffs. These
            results suggest that to gauge their impacts and guide policy
            making, non-tariff measures should not be bundled together
            in empirical analyses.
Expansionary Austerity :
            Reallocating Credit Amid Fiscal Consolidation
This paper shows expansionary fiscal
            austerity via reallocation of credit supply, but with a
            raise in poverty. For identification, the paper exploits the
            introduction of a Mexican law limiting the debt of
            subnational governments along with matched credit register,
            firm, bank, and state datasets. After the law, states with
            higher ex ante public debt grow substantially faster,
            despite larger fiscal consolidation (higher taxes and lower
            public expenditure). Banks operating in more indebted states
            reallocate credit supply away from local governments into
            private firms, with stronger effects for banks with higher
            exposure to local public debt, consistent with lowering
            crowding out. Effects only happen after the law, not before,
            and there are strong firm-level real effects associated. The
            reduction of crowding out is stronger for financially
            constrained firms and for firms operating in states with
            higher ex ante public spending on social services over
            infrastructure projects. In states more affected by the law,
            despite better economic effects, extreme poverty
            increases––especially in states with higher ex ante public
            spending on social services over infrastructure––consistent
            with a strong reduction for social services during the
            fiscal consolidation.
Does the Gender Wage Gap Influence
            Intimate Partner Violence in Brazil Evidence from
            Administrative Health Data
Improving women’s economic status has
            been presented in theory as a protective mechanism against
            intimate partner violence. Using panel data from 2011–16 for
            the most populous 20 percent of municipalities in Brazil,
            the analysis tests if the gender wage gap is causally
            associated with three administrative measures of violence
            against women: homicides, overnight hospitalizations for
            assault, and incidents of domestic violence reported by
            attending health workers about patients. The analysis finds
            that a narrowing in the gender wage gap leads to a reduction
            of homicides of women, especially among younger women and in
            municipalities with a low Human Development Index. The
            impact on less severe forms of violence, also captured in
            medical reports, depends on the context. A reduction in the
            gender wage ratio triggers a decrease in reports in
            municipalities that have police stations specifically
            designed to address crimes against women, but it has the
            opposite impact in the absence of such services. The results
            suggest that while improvements in gender equality in the
            labor market curtail the most severe forms of violence
            against women, they need to be complemented by policies
            directly focused on women’s safety to reduce less severe
            violence effectively.
Firm-Level Adoption of Technologies
            in Senegal
Technology is key to boost productivity
            and generate more and better quality jobs in Senegal. This
            paper uses a novel approach to measure technology adoption
            at the firm level and applies it to a representative sample
            of firms in Senegal. It provides new measures of technology
            adoption at the firm level, which identify the purposes for
            which technologies are used and analyzes some of the key
            barriers to improving technology adoption at the firm level
            in Senegal. First, the adoption of general-purpose
            information and communications technologies, such as
            computers, the internet, and cloud computing for business
            purpose, is low but very heterogeneous and positively
            associated with size and formal status. Second, most firms
            still rely on pre-digital technologies to perform general
            business functions, such as business administration,
            production planning, supply chain management, marketing,
            sales, and payment. Third, most firms, including large and
            formal firms, still rely on manual methods or manually
            operated machines to perform critical pro duction tasks that
            are sector specific, such as harvesting in agriculture or
            packaging in food processing. The paper presents evidence of
            three main challenges to improve technology adoption: access
            to finance, information, and knowledge (firm capabilities),
            and access to markets and competition.
Trade Impacts of
            Intellectual-Property-Related PTAs : Evidence from Using the
            World Bank Deep Trade Agreements Database
This paper uses the World Bank database
            on deep trade agreements to demonstrate the rapid increase
            in preferential trade agreements with standards of
            intellectual property protection that are enforceable and
            elevated beyond the minimums required in the World Trade
            Organization Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
            Rights Agreement. These accords are referred to as
            intellectual property–related preferential trade agreements.
            The paper sets out a treatment-control econometric approach,
            in which treated agreements are defined by various
            characteristics and the control group is other preferential
            trade agreements. This approach is used to study whether
            membership in intellectual property–related preferential
            trade agreements affects a country’s trade with nonmember
            countries. For this purpose, the paper defines a set of
            industries that intensively use intellectual property rights
            (the high-intellectual property group) and a set of
            industries that do not (the low-intellectual property
            group). There is evidence that countries in these agreements
            with the United States, the European Union, or the European
            Free Trade Association experience significant increases in
            third-country aggregated exports of biopharmaceuticals at
            all levels of income, while exports of low-intellectual
            property goods are relatively diminished, compared with the
            control preferential trade agreements. This result is
            reinforced using detailed bilateral sectoral trade and holds
            also for exports of medical devices from higher-income
            economies. Because these industries are the target of many
            elevated standards in intellectual property–related
            preferential trade agreements, the result suggests that
            these policies affect trade volumes. Further exploratory
            analysis suggests that these impacts are associated with
            higher local sales of affiliates of multinational firms,
            using US data. These are viewed as preliminary findings that
            point to the need for further analysis.
Polygyny and Farm Households'
            Resilience to Climate Shocks
Climate change and weather shocks pose
            major challenges for household income security and
            well-being, especially for smallholder farmers’ communities.
            In such communities, imperfect risk insurance and labor
            markets may induce households to use traditional
            institutions such as polygyny to harness their size and
            composition to their resilience strategies against these
            shocks. This paper tests this hypothesis by analyzing how
            polygyny’s interaction with droughts affects crop yields.
            For identification, the paper relies on the spatial
            variation in polygyny’s prevalence across Mali’s rural
            communes and the randomness of drought episodes. The
            findings show that polygynous communities are more resilient
            to drought-induced crop failure. Exploration of the
            mechanisms shows that polygynous communities diversify their
            income sources more than monogamous ones, including via
            child marriage—a phenomenon known to undermine women’s
            outcomes. As the literature links polygyny to
            underdevelopment, interventions to eliminate it should make
            formal resilience and adaptation strategies available to
            drought-prone communities. Failure to do so may entrench
            political opposition to enforcing a ban on polygyny and
            child marriage.
Digital Payments and Business
            Resilience : Evidence in the Time of COVID-19
During the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers
            were encouraged to use contactless payments. An important
            policy question is whether merchants with contactless
            payment technology are more resilient to an external health
            shock than those without. Using a matched
            difference-in-differences setting on unique merchant
            card-sales transaction data, this study finds that merchants
            with contactless payment technology increase their
            card-sales amount (count) on average by 8.3 percent (10.2
            percent) compared with merchants without this technology. It
            also finds evidence that accepting contactless payment
            during an epidemic shock helps merchants attract more new
            consumers. Digital payment technology continues to support
            sales growth, especially for small businesses and new entrepreneurs.
Recurrent Climatic Shocks and
            Humanitarian Aid : Impacts on Livelihood Outcomes in Malawi
Between 2014 and 2016 unprecedented and
            consecutive climatic shocks ravaged Malawi, one of the
            poorest countries in the world. The largest ever emergency
            relief operation in the country’s history ensued. The
            pathways and extent to which the humanitarian response
            protected livelihoods remain under researched. This paper
            uses a unique data set that combines longitudinal household
            survey data with GIS-based measures of weather shocks and
            climate conditions and longitudinal administrative data on
            the World Food Programme’s aid distribution. The paper aims
            to understand the drivers of humanitarian aid and evaluate
            the impact of aid and weather shocks on outcomes related to
            household production and consumption in Malawi. The analysis
            shows that droughts and floods had consistent negative
            impacts on a range of welfare outcomes, particularly for
            households that were subject to sequential shocks. Aid
            receipt is demonstrated to attenuate such impacts, again
            particularly for households that experienced the shocks
            consecutively. Households living in areas subject to a
            weather shock and with higher World Food Programme aid
            distribution were more likely to receive food aid, partially
            explaining the success of aid in mitigating the impacts of
            shocks. However, there is significant scope for improving
            the criteria for targeting humanitarian aid beneficiaries.
The Hidden Potential of Call Detail
            Records in The Gambia
Aggregated data from mobile network
            operators can provide snapshots of population mobility
            patterns in real time, generating valuable insights when
            other more traditional data sources are unavailable or out
            of date. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the value of
            remotely collected, high-frequency, localized data in
            inferring the economic impact of shocks to inform decision
            making. However, proper protocols must be put in place to
            ensure end-to-end user confidentiality and compliance with
            international best practice. This paper demonstrates how to
            build such a data pipeline, for the case of The Gambia,
            channeling data from mobile network operators through the
            national regulator to the analytical users, who in turn
            produce policy relevant insights. The aggregated indicators
            analyzed offer a detailed snapshot of the decrease in
            mobility and increased out-migration from urban to rural
            areas during the COVID-19 lockdown. Recommendations based on
            lessons learned from this process can inform engagements
            with other regulators in creating data pipelines to inform
            policy making.
Reducing Bias in Phone Survey
            Samples : Effectiveness of Reweighting Techniques Using
            Face-to-Face Surveys as Frames in Four African Countries
Several developing countries are
            currently implementing phone surveys in response to
            immediate data needs to monitor the socioeconomic impact of
            COVID-19. However, phone surveys are often subject to
            coverage and non-response bias that can compromise the
            representativeness of the sample and the external validity
            of the estimates obtained from the survey. Using data from
            high-frequency phone surveys in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria,
            and Uganda, this study investigates the magnitude and source
            of biases present in these four surveys and explores the
            effectiveness of techniques applied to reduce bias. Varying
            levels of coverage and non-response bias are found in all
            four countries. The successfully contacted samples in these
            four countries were biased toward wealthier households with
            higher living standards. Left unaddressed, this bias would
            result in biased estimates from the interviewed sample that
            do not fully reflect the situation of poorer households in
            the country. However, phone survey biases can be
            substantially reduced by applying survey weight adjustments
            using information from the representative survey from which
            the sample is drawn. Applying these methods to the four
            surveys resulted in a substantial reduction in bias,
            although the bias was not fully eradicated. This highlights
            one of the potential advantages of drawing phone survey
            samples from existing face-to-face, representative surveys
            over random digit dialing or using lists from telecom
            providers where such adjustment methods can be more limited.