rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Intrahousehold inequality and child
            gender bias in Ethiopia
The Rothbarth model of intrahousehold
            resource allocation has consistently failed to detect child
            gender bias in many applications over the past two decades.
            This paper challenges the current consensus that the
            Rothbarth method is not effective in revealing child gender
            bias from consumption behavior of adults. It proposes an
            approach to the Rothbarth model that restricts its
            application to samples of nuclear households, and employs an
            index of child gender based on the number of children in the
            household and related to a specific selective mechanism of
            discrimination. It demonstrates the effectiveness of this
            approach with an application to a 2005-06 Ethiopian
            consumption survey of 21,299 households conducted by
            Ethiopia's Statistical Authority, covering both urban
            and rural areas. The paper presents the first clear and
            extensive evidence of discrimination against girls by all
            four adult goods employed, and the outcome persists, in
            various degrees, when reexamined with a lower definition of
            child age, and with female-headed households. The findings
            provide support for gender-based policies in child-health
            and education in Ethiopia.
The effect of male migration for
            work on employment patterns of females in nepal
This paper assesses the impact of
            work-related migration by males on the labor market behavior
            of females in Nepal. Using data from the 2004 Nepal
            household survey, the authors apply the Instrumental
            Variable Full Information Maximum Likelihood method to
            account for unobserved factors that could simultaneously
            affect males' decision to migrate and females'
            decision to participate in the labor market. The results
            indicate that male migration for work has a negative impact
            on the level of market work participation by the women left
            behind. The authors find evidence of substantial
            heterogeneity (based both on observable and unobservable
            characteristics) in the impact of male migration. The
            findings highlight the important gender dimension of the
            impact of predominantly male worker migration on the
            wellbeing of sending households. The authors argue that
            strategies for economic development in Nepal should take
            into account such gender aspects of the migration dynamics.
Populist fiscal policy
Political economy explanations for
            fiscal profligacy are dominated by models of bargaining
            among organized interest groups over group-specific targeted
            benefits financed by generalized taxation. These models
            predict that governments consisting of a coalition of
            political parties spend more than single-party regimes. This
            paper presents an alternative model-that of populist
            pressure on political parties to spend more on the general
            public good, financed by costly income taxation-and obtains
            the opposite prediction. According to this model, public
            spending and taxes are lower under coalition governments
            that can win elections more cheaply. Indeed, in order to win
            elections, coalition partners need to satisfy a smaller
            share of swing voters than does a single-party government
            that enjoys narrower support from its core constituency. A
            coalition government therefore spends less on the public
            good to capture the share of the swing vote necessary for
            re-election. Using data from more than 70 countries during
            the period 1970-2006, the paper provides robust supporting
            evidence for this alternative model.
Carbon markets, institutions,
            policies, and research
The scale of investment needed to slow
            greenhouse gas emissions is larger than governments can
            manage through transfers. Therefore, climate change policies
            rely heavily on markets and private capital. This is
            especially true in the case of the Kyoto Protocol with its
            provisions for trade and investment in joint projects. This
            paper describes institutions and policies important for new
            carbon markets and explains their origins.  Research efforts
            that explore conceptual aspects of current policy are
            surveyed along with empirical studies that make predictions
            about how carbon markets will work and perform. The authors
            summarize early investment and price outcomes from newly
            formed markets and point out areas where markets have
            preformed as predicted and areas where markets remain
            incomplete. Overall the scale of carbon-market investment
            planned exceeds earlier expectations, but the geographic
            dispersion of investment is uneven and important
            opportunities for abatement remain untapped in some sectors,
            indicating a need for additional research on how investment
            markets work. How best to promote the development and
            deployment of new technologies is another promising area for
            study identified in the paper.
Impacts of land certification on
            tenure security, investment, and land markets : evidence
            from Ethiopia
Although early attempts at land titling
            in Africa were often unsuccessful, the need to secure rights
            in view of increased demand for land, options for
            registration of a continuum of individual or communal rights
            under new laws, and the scope for reducing costs by
            combining information technology with participatory methods
            have led to renewed interest. This paper uses a
            difference-in-difference approach to assess economic impacts
            of a low-cost registration program in Ethiopia that, over 5
            years, covered some 20 million parcels. Despite policy
            constraints, the program increased tenure security,
            land-related investment, and rental market participation and
            yielded benefits significantly above the cost of implementation.
Catastrophe risk pricing : an
            empirical analysis
The price of catastrophe risks is viewed
            by many to be too high and/or too volatile.  Catastrophe
            risk practitioners point out that, contrary to standard
            insurance, such as automobile insurance, catastrophe
            re-insurance is exposed to infrequent but potentially very
            large losses.  It thus requires keeping a large amount of
            capital in hand, generating a cost of capital to be added to
            the long-term expected loss.  This paper pulls together data
            from about 250 catastrophe bonds issued on the capital
            markets to investigate how catastrophe risks are priced.
            The analysis reveals that catastrophe risk prices are a
            function of the underlying peril, the expected loss, the
            wider capital market cycle, and the risk profile of the
            transaction.  The market-based catastrophe risk price is
            estimated to be 2.69 times the expected loss over the long
            term, that is, the long-term average multiple is 2.69.  When
            adjusted from the market cycle, the multiple is estimated at
            2.33.  Peak perils like US Wind are shown to have a much
            higher multiple than that of non-peak perils like Japan
            Wind, revealing the diversification of credit from the market.
In search of the missing resource curse
The debate over the curse of natural
            resources has haunted developing countries for decades if
            not centuries. A review of existing empirical evidence
            suggests that the curse remains elusive. The fragile
            negative effect of natural resources on economic growth
            might be due to international heterogeneity in the effects
            of natural resources on economic growth, to the use of weak
            indicators of natural resources that might be unrelated to
            relative natural-resource endowments, or to the inability of
            econometric analysis based on international data to capture
            historical processes. This paper defends an empirical proxy
            for relative abundance of natural resources, which is based
            on standard growth theory. In turn, various econometric
            estimations are hopelessly deployed in the search for the
            missing resource curse. Some evidence suggests that natural
            resources might have large positive effects whose true
            magnitude remains unknown due to unresolved econometric issues.
Macro-micro feedback links of water
            management in South Africa : CGE analyses of selected policy regimes
The pressure on an already stressed
            water situation in South Africa is predicted to increase
            significantly under climate change, plans for large
            industrial expansion, observed rapid urbanization, and
            government programs to provide access to water to millions
            of previously excluded people. The present study employed a
            general equilibrium approach to examine the economy-wide
            impacts of selected macro and water related policy reforms
            on water use and allocation, rural livelihoods, and the
            economy at large. The analyses reveal that implicit
            crop-level water quotas reduce the amount of irrigated land
            allocated to higher-value horticultural crops and create
            higher shadow rents for production of lower-value,
            water-intensive field crops, such as sugarcane and fodder.
            Accordingly, liberalizing local water allocation in
            irrigation agriculture is found to work in favor of
            higher-value crops, and expand agricultural production and
            exports and farm employment. Allowing for water trade
            between irrigation and non-agricultural uses fueled by
            higher competition for water from industrial expansion and
            urbanization leads to greater water shadow prices for
            irrigation water with reduced income and employment benefits
            to rural households and higher gains for non-agricultural
            households. The analyses show difficult tradeoffs between
            general economic gains and higher water prices, making
            irrigation subsidies difficult to justify.
Macro-micro feedback links of water
            management in South Africa : CGE analyses of selected policy regimes
WPS4768 Policy ReseaRch WoRking PaPeR 4768 Macro-Micro Feedback Links of Water Management in South Africa CGE Analyses of Selected Policy Regimes _R. Hassan J. Thurlow T. Roe X. Diao S. Chumi Y. Tsur_ The World Bank Development Research Group Sustainable Rural and Urban Development Team November 2008
Endowments, location or luck
            evaluating the determinants of sub-national growth in
            decentralized Indonesia
Indonesia's "big bang"
            decentralization in 2001 shifted much of the responsibility
            for local economic development from central government to
            district and city governments, which today number more than
            450.  But the performance of these districts has varied
            widely.  This paper attempts to understand the determinants
            of sub-national (district/city) growth in Indonesia and map
            how these determinants have changed since before the 1997/98
            economic crisis.  The authors exploit a rich dataset that
            includes a wide range of district-level characteristics,
            including education, population, cultural, economic, and
            infrastructure variables, as well as a set of variables
            relating to distance, to try to explain growth.  The
            analysis finds that, after accounting for differences in
            other variables, poorer districts tend to grow faster than
            better off districts.  Similarly, there is evidence of
            spatial divergence, in the sense that districts tend to grow
            faster if their neighbors are growing quickly.  However, the
            quality of the existing district-level data makes it
            difficult to identify whether endowments or factors related
            to distance are systematically associated with growth.
Rural roads and poor area
            development in Vietnam
The authors assess impacts of rural road
            rehabilitation on market development at the commune level in
            rural Vietnam and examine the variance of those impacts and
            the geographic, community, and household factors that
            explains it. Double difference and matching methods are used
            to address sources of selection bias in identifying impacts.
            The results point to significant average impacts on the
            development of local markets. They also uncover evidence of
            considerable impact heterogeneity, with a tendency for
            poorer communes to have higher impacts due to lower levels
            of initial market development. Yet, poor areas are also
            saddled with other attributes that reduce those impacts.
What are public services worth, and
            to whom Non-parametric estimation of capitalization in Pune
The availability and quality of basic
            public services are important determinants of urban quality
            of life. In many cities, rapid population growth and fiscal
            constraints are limiting the extent to which urban
            governments can keep up with increasing demand for these
            services. It therefore becomes important to prioritize
            provision of those services to best reflect local demand.
            The authors present a strategy to estimate the demand for
            public services, which is sensitive to heterogeneity in
            preferences across types of households, and the
            nonparametric estimation addresses problems arising from
            functional form restrictions. Using data from Pune, India,
            they estimate the demand for public services, as represented
            by the marginal change in the self-assessed monthly rental
            price of dwellings from the services. The authors find that
            the value of publicly provided services accruing to the poor
            is greater than that going to wealthier households, and even
            untargeted across-the-board investment in specific services
            can be progressive.
An empirical analysis of the annuity
            rate in Chile
Empirical analyses of annuities markets
            have been limited to a few industrial countries and
            restricted by data limitations. Chile provides excellent
            conditions for research on annuities because of the depth of
            its market and the availability of data. The authors use a
            panel of life insurance company data to examine
            econometrically the main determinants of the annuity rate,
            defined as the internal rate of return on annuities. The
            results indicate that the annuity rate is determined by the
            risk-free interest rate, the share of privately-issued
            higher yield securities in the portfolio of providers as a
            proxy for the spread over the risk-free rate, the leverage
            of providers, the level of broker's commissions, the
            market share of individual providers, the level of the
            premium, and the degree of market competition. The results
            also show that efforts to improve market transparency
            produced structural shifts in the parameters of the annuity
            rate equation. The results are consistent with separate
            research on money's worth ratios, and indicate the need
            to develop appropriate financial instruments, allowing
            providers to hedge their risks while extracting higher
            returns, and also to ensure competition and transparency in
            annuities markets, in order to ensure good outcomes for annuitants.
Cash transfers, conditions, school
            enrollment, and child work : evidence from a randomized
            experiment in Ecuador
The impact of cash transfer programs on
            the accumulation of human capital is a topic of great policy
            importance. An attendant question is whether program effects
            are larger when transfers are "conditioned" on
            certain behaviors, such as a requirement that households
            enroll their children in school. This paper uses a
            randomized study design to analyze the impact of the Bono de
            Desarrollo Humano (BDH), a cash transfer program, on
            enrollment and child work among poor children in Ecuador.
            There are two main results. First, the BDH program had a
            large, positive impact on school enrollment, about 10
            percentage points, and a large, negative impact on child
            work, about 17 percentage points. Second, the fact that some
            households believed that there was a school enrollment
            requirement attached to the transfers, even though such a
            requirement was never enforced or monitored in Ecuador,
            helps explain the magnitude of program effects.
Did growth become less pro-poor in
            the 1990s
The author analyzes the stability of the
            empirical relationship between growth and changes in
            inequality over time. He concludes that while during the
            1970s and 1980s the growth process was not accompanied by
            increases in inequality, during the 1990s a positive and
            significant correlation appears in the data. For this
            decade, he estimates that a 1 percent growth rate would be
            associated with an increase in the gini coefficient of
            between .3 to .5 percent. This positive correlation is
            hidden when one estimates the model without allowing for
            changes in the relationship over the different decades. The
            finding is robust to a number of departures from the basic
            specification including: (1) the use of alternative
            specifications to isolate decadal shifts; (2) the use of
            robust estimation techniques that address the potential
            influence of outliers; (3) restricting the sample to a
            balanced panel for the 1980s and 1990s to control for
            changes in the composition of the sample related to the
            unbalanced nature of the panel; and (4) considering the
            possibility of fixed effects in the data. The author also
            explores the impact of this structural change in the rate of
            poverty reduction and concludes that it is far from negligible.
Internationalization and the
            evolution of corporate valuation
By documenting the evolution of
            Tobin's q before, during, and after firms
            internationalize, the authors provide evidence on the
            bonding, segmentation, and market timing theories of
            internationalization. Using new data on 9,096 firms across
            74 countries over the period 1989-2000, they find that
            Tobin's q does not rise after internationalization,
            even relative to firms that do not internationalize.
            Instead, q rises significantly before internationalization
            and during the internationalization year. But then q falls
            sharply in the year after internationalization, quickly
            relinquishing the increases of the previous years. To
            account for these dynamics, the authors show that market
            capitalization rises before internationalization and remains
            high, while corporate assets increase during
            internationalization. The evidence supports models stressing
            that financial internationalization facilitates corporate
            expansion, but challenges models stressing that
            internationalization produces an enduring effect on q by
            bonding firms to a better corporate governance system.
Governance and private investment in
            the Middle East and North Africa
This paper addresses the issue of the
            low level of private investment in the Middle East and North
            Africa (MENA) region, with special emphasis on the role of
            governance. Based on the existing literature, the authors
            categorize what types of governance institutions are more
            detrimental to entrepreneurial investments. They then
            estimate a simultaneous model of private investment and
            governance quality where economic policies concurrently
            explain both variables. The empirical results show that
            governance plays a significant role in private investment
            decisions. This result is particularly true in the case of
            "administrative quality" in the form of control of
            corruption, bureaucratic quality, investment-friendly
            profile of administration, and law and order, as well as for
            "political stability." Evidence in favor of
            "public accountability" seems, however, less
            robust. The estimations also stress that structural
            reforms-such as financial development and trade openness-and
            human development affect private investment decisions
            directly, and/or through their positive impact on
            governance. These findings bring new empirical evidence on
            the subject of private investment in the developing world
            and in MENA countries in particular.