rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
It's only words : validating
            the CPIA governance assessments
This study analyzes the validity of the
            World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional
            Assessments governance ratings, an important factor in
            allocating the Bank's concessionary International
            Development Association funds. It tests for certain biases
            in the ratings, and examines the quality of the written
            justifications that accompany the ratings. The study finds
            no evidence of bias in favor of International Development
            Association-eligible countries, despite a potential moral
            hazard problem inherent in the ratings process. However,
            there is some evidence of an upward bias in ratings for one
            region, relative to the other five regions. The study finds
            significant regional differences in the quality of the
            written justifications accompanying the six World Bank
            regions' proposed ratings. The length of these
            write-ups has exploded over time. Although higher-quality
            write-ups are also longer on average, there is wide
            dispersion in the word count at any given quality level, and
            some long write-ups provide little relevant information.
            Higher quality write-ups are associated with a lower
            likelihood that central unit reviewers will either disagree
            with proposed ratings, or request additional information to
            assess the proposed rating. Controlling for quality, longer
            write-ups are associated with a greater probability that
            central reviewers will disagree with a proposed rating.
            Although checks and balances built into the process appear
            to work reasonably well, the author concludes that a more
            proactive role for central unit reviewers and regional chief
            economists' offices could further enhance the quality
            of write-ups and reduce regional bias.
A public strategy for compliance monitoring
Theoretical accounts of compliance with
            court orders emphasize the importance of transparency. Most
            empirical studies of compliance center on high profile
            political cases, largely ignoring the high-volume, quotidian
            claims against the state for basic services that constitute
            the largest share of court dockets in many jurisdictions.
            This paper uses a unique dataset on compliance with orders
            from the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of
            Costa Rica to examine the determinants of compliance in low
            salience cases. It finds that orders issued just after the
            Court announced, in a press conference, that it was
            monitoring compliance were implemented roughly two months
            sooner than orders issued just prior to the press
            conference. These findings suggest that publicity can
            motivate compliance even in low salience cases.
The transmission of banking crises
            to households : lessons from the 2008-2011 crises in the ECA region
This paper examines the impact of the
            recent banking crises in Europe and Central Asia on
            households' incomes and consumption patterns. The
            analysis is based on the 2010 wave of the Life in Transition
            Survey, which covers 12,704 households in eleven countries
            that experienced a banking crisis between 2008 and 2011. It
            finds that households in middle-income crisis countries are
            more than twice as likely to be hit by an income shock as
            households in high-income crisis countries. The labor market
            channel is the predominant source of income shocks, with
            wage reductions more widespread than job-losses. In reaction
            to income shocks, households reallocate spending from
            non-essential goods to staple foods. Reductions in
            staple-food consumption are, however, prevalent among
            low-income households. The paper examines potential crisis
            mitigators and finds that at the macro level a flexible
            monetary regime is associated with fewer cutbacks in
            household consumption. At the meso level, it finds no
            evidence that foreign bank ownership amplified the
            transmission of banking crises to households in Europe. With
            respect to micro-level mitigators, the analysis finds that
            diversified income sources as well as stocks of
            non-financial and financial assets help households to
            cushion income shocks. Access to informal and formal credit
            also mitigates the impact of income shocks on household
            consumption, with the former especially important in
            middle-income countries.
Labor market returns to early
            childhood stimulation : a 20-year followup to an
            experimental intervention in Jamaica
This paper finds large effects on the
            earnings of participants from a randomized intervention that
            gave psychosocial stimulation to stunted Jamaican toddlers
            living in poverty. The intervention consisted of one-hour
            weekly visits from community Jamaican health workers over a
            2-year period that taught parenting skills and encouraged
            mothers to interact and play with their children in ways
            that would develop their children's cognitive and
            personality skills. The authors re-interviewed the study
            participants 20 years after the intervention. Stimulation
            increased the average earnings of participants by 42
            percent. Treatment group earnings caught up to the earnings
            of a matched non-stunted comparison group. These findings
            show that psychosocial stimulation early in childhood in
            disadvantaged settings can have substantial effects on labor
            market outcomes and reduce later life inequality.
Labor market returns to early
            childhood stimulation : a 20-year followup to an
            experimental intervention in Jamaica
WPS6529 Policy Research Working Paper 6529 Labor Market Returns to Early Childhood Stimulation A 20-year Followup to an Experimental Intervention in Jamaica _Paul Gertler James Heckman Rodrigo Pinto Arianna Zanolini Christel Vermeersch Susan Walker Susan Chang-Lopez Sally Grantham-McGregor_ The World Bank Latin America and the Caribbean Region Education Sector July 2013
Economic development as opportunity equalization
Economic development should be conceived
            of as the degree to which an economy has implemented an
            efficient and just distribution of economic resources. The
            ubiquitous measure of GDP per capita reflects a utilitarian
            conception of justice, where individual utility is defined
            as personal income, and social welfare is the average of
            utilities in a population. A more attractive conception of
            justice is opportunity-equalization. Here, a two-dimensional
            measure of economic development is proposed, based upon
            viewing individuals incomes as a consequence of
            circumstances, effort, and policy. The first dimension is
            the average income level of those in the society with the
            most disadvantaged circumstances, and the second dimension
            is the degree to which total income inequality is due to
            differential effort, as opposed to differential
            circumstances. This pair of numbers is computed for a set of
            22 European countries. No country dominates all others on
            both dimensions. The two-dimensional measure induces a
            partial ordering of countries with respect to development.
Solow in transition : macro and
            micro determinants of savings in Armenia
This paper analyzes and reconciles macro
            and micro evidence on savings and factors that affect
            savings, as well as possible policy implications. At the
            aggregate level, the main question is how savings are
            affected by growth and macroeconomic policies and variables
            (fiscal policy, exchange rate, for example) and the breadth
            of financial markets. Some of these macro determinants can
            be reconciled with microeconomic evidence of the savings
            behavior of households. Using macroeconomic quarterly data
            and household survey data, the analysis explores the
            determinants of the savings rate at the macroeconomic and
            microeconomic levels, using the typical econometric models
            used in the literature (long-term co-integration relation
            and short-term error correction model for the macro
            determinants; linear multivariate models for the micro
            determinants). The long-term relationship indicates that a
            10-percent increase in gross domestic product per capita
            would add 3.7 percentage points to the savings rate in the
            long run. The short-term relationship depicts a strong
            catch-up process to the long-run equilibrium, with quarterly
            changes in gross domestic product per capita and openness
            strongly correlated with quarterly changes in the savings
            rate. The characteristics of households that represent the
            volatility of expected income, such as education and access
            to borrowing or remittances, significantly impact saving
            rates. The macroeconomic and microeconomic analyses of the
            determinants of saving rates in Armenia point to three
            policy areas: the macroeconomic environment, the financial
            sector, and the role of remittances.
Determinants of job creation in
            eleven new EU member states : evidence from firm level data
This paper builds on the analysis of job
            creation developed in World Bank (2013) to provide an
            empirical investigation of the industry and firm-specific
            determinants of the job creation process in eleven new
            European Union (EU11) economies. It relies on the Amadeus
            dataset of firms during 2002-2009. The main results indicate
            that during the years prior to the global financial crisis,
            traditional industries were crucial for the net creation of
            jobs in EU11. However, traditional industries were the ones
            most severely affected by the financial crisis. By contrast,
            services firms were less vulnerable to the economic
            downturn. At the firm level, small and young firms
            registered the highest employment growth rates. The
            empirical results also indicate that more productive firms
            tended to be less vulnerable to economic downturns.
            Moreover, the results demonstrate that the perceived quality
            of the business climate by the EU11 enterprises is
            correlated with not only the firms' employment growth,
            but also their productivity. In the post-crisis period, poor
            business restrictions were negatively associated with the
            creation of jobs. All these findings hold for the group of
            high-growth firms that disproportionately accounted for the
            creation of new jobs in the EU11 economies.
Resource reallocation and innovation
            : converting enterprise risks into opportunities
This paper argues that the increased
            flow and management of knowledge permitted by
            knowledge-based capital, supported by appropriate policies,
            can be an important factor in reducing the decision risk
            facing enterprises due to uncertainty and imperfect
            information, helping improve the resilience of development
            outcomes. Enterprises are conceptualized as information
            platforms that manage risk through investments in
            knowledge-based capital and complementary assets, providing
            them with the knowledge, protection/enabling, insurance, and
            coping/leveraging abilities to make better decisions in
            response to shocks. Investments in knowledge-based capital
            allow enterprises to better convert voluntary but risky
            reallocation and innovation decisions into productivity and
            wealth-enhancing opportunities. They can help the enterprise
            sector as a whole and most people to self-protect and
            realize better jobs, earnings, and consumption outcomes by
            adapting to shocks. However, absent appropriate policies,
            knowledge-based capital can have adverse distributional
            effects -- including a skewed industrial concentration of
            productivity gains and more unequal consumption and
            income-earning outcomes between rich and poor people. The
            paper discusses the role of policy in facilitating risk
            management by enterprises, ultimately to reduce poverty and
            boost shared prosperity. Insufficient enterprise risk-taking
            is costly for the enterprise sector and the economy as it
            results in too little experimentation and learning. The
            paper argues that governments should create business
            environments that stimulate entrepreneurial risk-taking to
            invest in market and social opportunities that combine new
            technologies with appropriately-skilled workers. Policies
            allowing people to better confront and manage their risks
            include: (1) spurring entrepreneurial experimentation; (2)
            supporting skills upgrading; and (3) promoting mechanisms
            for joint learning through global collaboration.
Food price spikes, price insulation,
            and poverty
This paper has two purposes. It first
            considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in
            restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world
            food price crisis. Those changes -- reductions in import
            protection or increases in export restraints -- were meant
            to partially insulate domestic markets from the spike in
            international prices. The authors find that this insulation
            added substantially to the spike in international prices for
            rice, wheat, maize, and oilseeds. As a result, although
            domestic prices rose less than they would have without
            insulation in some developing countries, in many other
            countries they rose more than they would have in the absence
            of such insulation. The paper's second purpose it to
            estimate the combined impact of such insulating behavior on
            poverty in various developing countries and globally. The
            analysis finds that the actual poverty-reducing impact of
            insulation is much less than its apparent impact, and that
            its net effect was to increase global poverty in 2008 by 8
            million people, although this increase was not significantly
            different from zero. Since there are domestic policy
            instruments, such as conditional cash transfers, that could
            now provide social protection for the poor far more
            efficiently and equitably than variations in border
            restrictions, the authors suggest it is time to seek a
            multilateral agreement to desist from changing restrictions
            on trade when international food prices spike.
Do economic crises lead to health
            and nutrition behavior responses analysis using longitudinal
            data from Russia
Using longitudinal data on more than
            2,000 Russian families spanning the period between 2007 and
            2010, this paper estimates the impact of the 2009 global
            financial crisis on food expenditures, health care
            expenditures, and doctor visits in Russia. The primary
            estimation strategy adopted is the semi-parametric
            difference-in-difference with propensity score matching
            technique. The analysis finds that household health and
            nutritional behavior indicators do not vary statistically
            between households that were crisis-affected and households
            that were not affected by the crisis. However, the analysis
            finds that crisis-affected poor families curtailed their
            out-of-pocket health expenditures during and after the
            crisis more than poor families that were not affected by the
            crisis did. In addition, crisis-affected vulnerable groups
            changed their health behavior. In particular, households
            with low educational attainment of household heads and
            households with more elderly people changed their health and
            nutrition behavior response when affected by the crisis. The
            results are invariant to the propensity score matching
            techniques and parametric fixed effects estimation models.
Impact evaluation of three types of
            early childhood development interventions in Cambodia
Scaling up early childhood development
            services has the potential to increase children's
            cognitive and socio-emotional development and promote school
            readiness in a large segment of the population. This study
            used a randomized controlled trial approach to evaluate
            three scaled-up programs designed to widen access to early
            childhood development services: formal preschools, community
            preschools, and home-based services. The impacts of all
            three programs fell short of expectations because of two key
            flaws in how they were scaled up. First, implementation did
            not receive due attention; as a result, school facilities
            were not completed as planned, community-based programs were
            not always established, and low, irregular stipends created
            difficulties in hiring and retaining teachers. Second, the
            services that were available were not promoted and thus not
            used as widely as anticipated. The results imply that the
            quality of programs supplied is critical, as is attention to
            the demand side of the problem. The finding that these
            programs fell short of expectations does not mean that
            interventions such as these are ineffective. Rather, it
            indicates that quality and demand require careful attention
            in attempts to scale up early childhood development
            interventions, and any problems should be addressed prior to
            evaluating effectiveness.
China's 2008 labor contract law
            : implementation and implications for China's workers
This paper presents empirical evidence
            from household and firm survey data collected during
            2009-2010 on the implementation of the 2008 Labor Contract
            Law and its effects on China's workers. The government
            and local labor bureaus have made substantial efforts to
            enforce the provisions of the new law, which has likely
            contributed to reversing a trend toward increasing
            informalization of the urban labor market. Enforcement of
            the law, however, varies substantially across cities. The
            paper analyzes the determinants of worker satisfaction with
            the enforcement of the law, the propensity of workers to
            have a labor contract, workers' awareness of the
            content of the law, and their likelihood of initiating
            disputes. The paper finds that all of these factors are
            highly correlated with the level of education, especially
            for migrants. Although higher labor costs may have had a
            negative impact on manufacturing employment growth, this has
            not led to an overall increase in aggregate unemployment or
            prevented the rapid growth of real wages. Less progress has
            been made in increasing social insurance coverage, although
            signing a labor contract is more likely to be associated
            with participation in social insurance programs than in the
            past, particularly for migrant workers.
Gender differences in the effects of
            vocational training : constraints on women and drop-out behavior
This paper provides experimental
            evidence on the effects of vocational and entrepreneurial
            training for Malawian youth, in an environment where access
            to schooling and formal sector employment is extremely low.
            It tracks a large fraction of program drop-outs -- a common
            phenomenon in the training evaluation literature -- and
            examines the determinants and consequences of dropping out
            and how it mediates the effects of such programs. The
            analysis finds that women make decisions in a more
            constrained environment, and their participation is affected
            by family obligations. Participation is more expensive for
            them, resulting in worse training experience. The training
            results in skills development, continued investment in human
            capital, and improved well-being, with more positive effects
            for men, but no improvements in labor market outcomes in the
            short run.
(Ineffective) messages to encourage
            recycling : evidence from a randomized evaluation in Peru
There is growing interest in using
            messaging to drive prosocial behaviors, which contribute to
            investment in public goods. The authors worked with a
            leading nongovernmental organization in Peru to randomize
            nine different prorecycling messages that were crafted on
            the basis of best practices, prior evidence, and theories of
            behavioral change. Different variants emphasized information
            on environmental or social benefits, social comparisons,
            social sanctions, authority, and reminders. None of the
            messages had significant effects on recycling behavior.
            However, reducing the cost of ongoing participation by
            providing a recycling bin significantly increased recycling
            among enrolled households.
A retrospective analysis of the
            house prices macro-relationship in the United States
This study provides empirical evidence
            on the strengthening of the impact of house prices on the US
            macroeconomy. The stability of the house prices macro-link
            is tested in a small-dimensional vector autoregressive model
            over the last fifty years. The estimated break-points are
            used to split the sample into different segments and a
            multivariate time series analysis is performed within
            subsamples. The paper finds a robust structural break in the
            mid-1980s. In addition, time series analysis across segments
            provides evidence that the effect of house prices, not only
            on private consumption, but also on economic activity, has
            intensified since the mid-1980s.