rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Too Much Energy : The Perverse
            Effect of Low Fuel Prices on Firms
This paper provides novel evidence on
            the impact of changes in energy prices on manufacturing
            performance in two large developing economies -- Indonesia
            and Mexico. It finds that unlike increases in electricity
            prices, which harm plants' performance, fuel price
            hikes result in higher productivity and profits of
            manufacturing plants. The results of instrumental variable
            estimation imply that a 10 percent increase in fuel prices
            would lead to a 3.3 percent increase in total factor
            productivity for Indonesian and 1.2 percent for Mexican
            plants. The evidence suggests that effects are driven by the
            incentives that fuel price increases provide to plants
            towards replacing inefficient fuel-powered with more
            productive electricity-powered capital equipment. These
            results help to re-evaluate the policy trade-off between
            reducing carbon emissions and improving economic
            performance, particularly in countries with large fuel
            subsidies such as Indonesia and Mexico.
Progress and Challenges of Upper
            Secondary Education in China
Over the past decade, China's
            transition rate from lower secondary education to higher
            secondary education has increased significantly, from 80.5
            to 93.7 percent. In light of this impressive progress, the
            Chinese government aimed at raising the gross enrollment
            rate in senior high schools to above 90 percent by 2020.
            Quality and relevance in vocational and academic high school
            education could be a key bottleneck in further expansion.
            The way tracking operates between academic and vocational
            streams could itself be a distortion for the sector's
            further expansion. Looking ahead, reforms in upper secondary
            education are imperative, given increasing demand for a
            highly skilled labor force and China's fast demographic
            change as the young population cohorts decline. The paper
            examines the sector's key constraints in access,
            financing, tracking, and informed decisions and recommends
            how the quality of the general and vocational education
            tracks can be further improved.
Trade Policy and Market Power :
            Firm-Level Evidence
This paper identifies the effect of
            trade policy on market power through new data and a new
            identification strategy. It uses a large data set containing
            export values and quantities by product and destination for
            all exporting firms in 12 developing and emerging countries
            over several years, merged with destination-product-specific
            information on tariffs and non-tariff barriers. Market power
            is identified by observing how exporting firms price
            discriminate across markets in reaction to variations in
            bilateral exchange rates. Pricing-to-market is prevalent in
            all regions of the sample, even among small firms, although
            it is increasing in firm size, in accordance with theory.
            More importantly, the effect of non-tariff measures is not
            isomorphic to that of tariffs: the observed
            pricing-to-market behavior suggests that, although tariffs
            reduce the market power of foreign firms through classic
            rent-shifting effects, non-tariff measures alter market
            structure and reinforce the market power of non-exiting
            firms, domestic and foreign ones alike.
Impact of Fiscal Policy on Poverty
            and Inequality in Uganda : Fiscal Incidence Analysis Using
            the UNHS 2016/17
This study analyzes the incidence of
            public revenues (tax collection) and expenditures (including
            direct and indirect transfers, indirect subsidies, and
            in-kind transfers) on the level of poverty and inequality in
            Uganda, using the internationally recognized methodology
            developed by the Commitment to Equity institute. The results
            show that Uganda's fiscal policy is moderately
            equalizing and lowers the Gini coefficient by 3.2 points.
            The personal income tax, followed by education in-kind
            transfers, are the biggest contributors to reducing
            inequality. Although equalizing, fiscal policy is
            poverty-inducing in Uganda.  Direct transfers are pro-poor
            in distribution but are not large enough to counteract the
            purchasing power reductions from indirect taxes; the poverty
            headcount ratio increases by 2.3 percentage points. Going
            forward, the combination of raising additional revenue by
            broadening the personal income tax base and removing
            valued-added tax exemptions while using the additional
            resources to increase the size and coverage of pro-poor
            direct transfers programs may alleviate poverty and reduce inequality.
Measuring and Explaining Management
            in Schools : New Approaches Using Public Data
Why do some students learn more in some
            schools than others? One consideration receiving growing
            attention is school management. To study this, researchers
            need to be able to measure school management accurately and
            cheaply at scale, and also explain any observed relationship
            between school management and student learning. This paper
            introduces a new approach to measurement using existing
            public data, and applies it to build a management index
            covering 15,000 schools across 65 countries, and another
            index covering nearly all public schools in Brazil. Both
            indices show a strong, positive relationship between school
            management and student learning. The paper then develops a
            simple model that formalizes the intuition that strong
            management practices might be driving learning gains via
            incentive and selection effects among teachers, students and
            parents. The paper shows that the predictions of this model
            hold in public data for Latin America, and draws out
            implications for policy.
Children Need Clean Water to Grow :
            E. Coli Contamination of Drinking Water and Childhood
            Nutrition in Bangladesh
Water, sanitation, and hygiene
            interventions are increasingly recognized as essential for
            improving nutritional outcomes in children. Emerging
            literature describes the negative effects of poor sanitation
            on child growth. However, limited evidence has shown a link
            between water quality and nutritional outcomes. Similar to
            poor sanitation, it is plausible that water contaminated
            with E. coli could affect the nutritional status of children
            through various possible biological pathways, such as
            repeated episodes of diarrhea, environmental enteropathy,
            parasites, or other mechanisms that inhibit nutrient uptake
            and absorption. This study explores the relationship between
            contaminated water and stunting prevalence among children
            younger than age five years, using unique cross-sectional
            data from the 2012–13 Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster
            Survey, which was one of the first nationally representative
            surveys to include water quality testing for E. coli. E.
            coli contamination in drinking water is measured at
            household and source points. Stunting is measured using
            height-for-age z-scores for children under five, where a
            child is considered stunted when he or she is two or more
            standard deviations below the median of the World Health
            Organization reference population. The results of multiple
            probit regression models indicate a 6 percent increase in
            the prevalence of stunting in children who are exposed to
            highly contaminated drinking water at household point
            compared with those exposed to low-to-medium contamination.
            When contamination is measured at the source level, the
            association is greater, with a 9 percent increase in the
            likelihood of stunting when exposed to a high level of contamination.
Children Need Clean Water to Grow :
            E. Coli Contamination of Drinking Water and Childhood
            Nutrition in Bangladesh
Policy Research Working Paper 9054

# Children Need Clean Water to Grow

E. Coli Contamination of Drinking Water and Childhood Nutrition in Bangladesh _George Joseph Sabrina S. Haque Nazia Moqueet Yi Rong Hoo_ Water Global Practice November 2019
Index Insurance : A Viable Solution
            for Irrigated Farming
This paper documents the practical
            experience of deploying index insurance in a tropical
            country whose agriculture is dependent on dual sources of
            water: rainfall and irrigation. The paper introduces an
            innovative hybrid index insurance product based on the
            authors' experience of piloting the concept. The hybrid
            product was created to address the higher basis risk of
            using a single rainfall trigger that ignores the
            hydrological conditions on the ground. The paper brings
            forth findings from a live pilot in selected locations --
            with varied agro-climatic conditions—in Sri Lanka under the
            World Bank Group's Global Index Insurance Facility. The
            findings indicate that the new hybrid product performs
            better than the single trigger (rainfall-based) index
            insurance product, thereby reducing the basis risk faced by
            farmers. The paper also shares some of the practical
            limitations in deploying the product.
Impact of Early Life Exposure to
            Environments with Unimproved Sanitation on Education
            Outcomes : Evidence from Bangladesh
Despite Bangladesh's notable
            progress toward the eradication of open defecation, the
            country still faces severe deficits in the availability of
            improved sanitation. This paper analyzes the impact of
            exposure to unimproved sanitation early in childhood on
            primary school enrollment status, using pseudo-panel data
            for children ages six to nine years in Bangladesh. The
            results indicate that unimproved sanitation has a negative
            and significant impact on primary school enrollment. A
            child's early exposure to unimproved sanitation
            decreases the likelihood of being enrolled in primary school
            by eight to ten percentage points on average compared with a
            child with access to improved sanitation. The effect is
            particularly strong -- a difference of 8 to 10 percentage
            points -- for children ages six to seven. It is also strong
            in rural areas. The results are statistically robust to
            errors due to potential omitted variable bias.
Credit Cycles in Countries in the
            MENA Region -- Do They Exist Do They Matter
This paper estimates private sector
            credit cycles for most of the oil-importing and
            oil-exporting countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
            Credit cycles are the medium-term component in spectral
            analysis of real private sector credit growth. In addition,
            the paper estimates the credit cycles for several Western
            countries and Japan. The analysis finds substantial
            differences and rare similarities between credit cycles in
            the Middle East and North Africa and developed countries.
            Over 1964-2017, credit cycles in the Middle East and North
            Africa do not appear to be associated with real gross
            domestic product growth. They only explain a fraction of the
            growth in private sector credit, and they do not seem to be
            synchronized across oil exporters and oil importers.
Management Practices in Croatia :
            Drivers and Consequences for Firm Performance
Embedding management and operational
            practices survey in a broader firm capabilities survey, this
            paper finds that an average firm in Croatia scores 0.532 on
            structured management practices, which is farther from the
            frontier (0.615 in the United States). This average,
            however, masks the wide heterogeneity in management
            practices among firms. Relative to advanced countries, a
            large share of firms in Croatia are badly managed.
            Management is particularly worse in services and more so in
            non-knowledge intensive services. Better managed firms show
            superior performance: improving the management score from
            the 10th decile to the 90th decile is expected to improve
            sales per employee by 36 percent, profits by 33 percent and
            the probability to innovate by 11 percent. Likewise, better
            managed firms more likely use sophisticated technologies and
            have a higher probability of accessing external finance.
            What drives firms to improve their management practices? As
            elsewhere in the world, global linkages of firms matter.
            However, unlike the evidence in advanced countries,
            management capabilities in Croatia is negatively associated
            with firm age, especially in services, indicating the
            possibility of allocative inefficiency, where learning and
            selection mechanism does not weed out the badly managed
            firms perhaps due to the lack of pro-competitive forces.
Improving Preschool Provision and
            Encouraging-Demand : Evidence from a Large-Scale
            Construction Program
This paper studies the impact of a
            preschool construction program and of two demand-side
            interventions in Cambodia. Within this context where other
            preschools are available, impacts are likely to differ
            between children who would have been enrolled in a
            preexisting preschool and those who would have stayed at
            home, with larger expected gains for the latter. The
            construction program caused enrollment to increase but
            demand-side interventions did not. After one year, the study
            measures intent-to-treat impacts on cognitive (0.04 standard
            deviations) and socio-emotional development (0.07 SD). The
            analysis also shows that the effect on children who would
            have stayed at home can be bounded (between 0.14 SD and 0.45
            SD). With further assumptions these bounds can be tightened
            (0.14 SD &#x2013; 0.35 SD) and under heavier
            assumptions, the study estimates this effect to be 0.19 SD,
            while the effect on children who would have benefited from
            another preschool is small and insignificant. These results
            are consistent with measures of preschool quality which
            imply that the newly constructed schooled only significantly
            improved infrastructure quality and not process quality.
            After two years of program implementation, most impacts
            become insignificant suggesting that the advantage provided
            by preschool quickly vanished, specifically once children
            enrolled in primary school.
Free Riding in Loan Approvals :
            Evidence from SME Lending in Peru
This paper provides evidence that
            commercial lenders in Peru free ride off their peers'
            screening efforts. Leveraging a discontinuity in the loan
            approval process of a large bank, the study finds that
            competing lenders responded to additional loan approvals by
            issuing approvals of their own. Competing lenders captured
            almost three-quarters of the new loans to previously
            financially excluded borrowers, greatly diminishing the
            profits accruing to the initiating bank. Lenders may
            therefore underinvest in screening new borrowers and
            expanding financial inclusion, as their competitors reap
            some of the benefit. The results highlight that information
            spillovers between lenders may operate outside credit registries.
Effects of a Multi-Faceted Education
            Program on Enrollment, Equity, Learning, and School
            Management : Evidence from India
The Sustainable Development Goals set a
            triple educational objective: improve access to, quality of,
            and gender equity in education. This paper documents the
            effectiveness of a multifaceted educational program,
            pursuing these three objectives simultaneously, in rural
            India. Using an experiment in 230 schools, the paper
            measures the effects of the program on students' school
            participation and academic performance over two years, while
            also examining heterogeneous impacts and sustainability. The
            findings show that the program increased enrollment,
            especially among girls (8.1 percent in the first year, 11.7
            percent in the second), reducing gender gaps in school
            retention. The findings show large learning gains of 0.323
            standard deviation due to the program in the first year and
            0.156 standard deviation at the end of the second year,
            which did not vary by gender. There were also large effects
            on school management outcomes, increasing the number of
            meetings by 16 percent and the number of improvement plans
            completed by 25 percent.
Exiting Financial Repression : The
            Case of Ethiopia
Ethiopia's framework for managing
            its monetary and foreign exchange policy has relied on some
            standard instruments of financial repression. Over time, the
            framework has led to the buildup of large macro-financial
            imbalances. Exiting financial repression while maintaining
            macroeconomic stability would require solid control over the
            macro-financial flows and good anticipation of the immediate
            financial effects of the reform. The paper presents and
            quantifies such a gradual liberalization reform scenario of
            Ethiopia's monetary and foreign exchange system.
Economywide and sectoral impacts on
            workers of Brazil’s internet rollout
This paper is a study of the effect of
            Brazil's staggered Internet rollout between 2000 and
            2014 on municipality employment and wages. The study uses a
            new, annual data set on Internet availability from the
            Brazil school census, with the assumption that the share of
            schools that have Internet access in each municipality
            reflects the general accessibility of Internet connections.
            These data are combined with Brazil's rich, matched
            employer-employee survey, which contains annual occupation
            and wage earnings information for all formally-employed
            workers in Brazil across all sectors, including primary,
            secondary, and tertiary industry groups. Contemporaneous and
            lagged effects are considered. The analysis finds that
            increased Internet access has no statistically significant
            net effect on aggregate employment, and has a negative
            effect on average wages, with a reduction in measures of
            wage dispersion. Brazil’s Internet rollout results in
            employment shifts from sectors with more limited expansion
            opportunities (wholesale and retail trade, public
            administration, and largely publicly-owned utilities, which
            jointly comprise almost half of the formal workforce in
            2010) to sectors with more output expansion opportunities.
            The employment effects are positive and most pronounced in
            the manufacturing, transport and storage, finance and
            insurance, and hospitality industry groups. In the
            manufacturing sector, Internet access induces positive
            employment and wage effects in medium- and high-skill occupations.
Does the World Bank foster business
This study investigates the impact of
            World Bank development policy loans on the ease of doing
            business. It finds that the cumulative number of development
            policy loans enhances business climate, especially for less
            developed countries and when combined with an International
            Monetary Fund assistance program. The results are robust to
            several specifications and sample restrictions, and
            controlling for possible endogeneity. When the cumulative
            number of loans and their cumulative value are included in
            the regression, the value is no longer significant. This
            finding suggests that overall engagement with the World Bank
            is more relevant than the amount of resources invested in
            the project.
Does oil revenue crowd out other tax
            revenues policy lessons for Uganda
This paper examines the relationship
            between hydrocarbon and non-hydrocarbon revenues using a
            probabilistic panel model with data covering 30
            resource-rich countries over 1992-2012. It also discusses
            policy implications for Uganda, a country with recently
            discovered oil reserves. The findings show that although an
            increase in hydrocarbon revenues is likely to crowd out
            non-resource revenues, improved institutional quality could
            dampen or reverse this effect. In general, regulatory
            quality, rule of law, government effectiveness, and
            political stability are critically important governance
            indicators. In light of Uganda's forthcoming
            exploitation of its oil, the odds of avoiding the crowding
            out of non-resource revenues are high with a substantial
            improvement of institutional quality in terms of political
            stability, regulatory quality, and government effectiveness.
            Currently, these indicators stand very low for Uganda as
            compared with Botswana
Child undernutrition in Pakistan :
            what do we know
Pakistan has an extraordinarily high and
            persistent level of child undernutrition. To effectively
            tackle the problem, the design of public policies and
            programs needs to be based on evidence. Toward this end,
            this paper presents a narrative review of the available
            empirical and qualitative literature on child undernutrition
            in Pakistan. It summarizes evidence for the country on,
            among other things, food consumption, spatial variation and
            trends in undernutrition rates, levels and effects of
            generally theorized determinants of undernutrition, and
            effects of various interventions on undernutrition. Based on
            patterns revealed in and insights gained from the cumulative
            evidence, the review lays out considerations and suggestions
            for further data collection and research, and for policy and practice.