rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Estimating the Magnitude of Water
            Supply and Sanitation Subsidies
The water supply and sanitation sector
            remains heavily subsidized around the world. Yet, the
            accounting of water supply and sanitation subsidies globally
            has proved challenging due to utility-level data limitations
            and their often implicit nature. This paper develops a
            methodology to estimate water supply and sanitation
            subsidies that is adaptable to data scarce environments,
            while accounting for differences among service providers
            such as population served (to account for economies of
            scale), coverage of water and sanitation services
            individually, and their level of operational efficiency in
            terms of water losses and staffing. This methodology is
            based on Chile’s empresa modelo (model firm) approach to
            cost-reflective tariff estimation and uses utility-level
            data from the World Bank's  International Benchmarking
            Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities database. The
            results suggest that the cost of subsidies associated with
            the operations, maintenance, and major repair and
            replacement of existing water supply and sanitation
            infrastructure in much of the world (excluding, notably,
            China and India) is an estimated $289 billion to $353
            billion per year, or 0.46 to 0.56 percent of the
            countries' combined gross domestic product. This figure
            rises, shockingly, to 1.59 to 1.95 percent if only low- and
            middle-income economies are considered, an amount largely
            due to the capital subsidies captured in the estimation.
            Subsidies of operating costs account for approximately 22
            percent of the total subsidy amount in the full sample and
            for low-income economies separately. Annual subsidy amounts
            by region range from 0.05 to 2.40 percent of gross domestic
            product, and low-income economies are generally at the high
            end of this range. The estimations do not include capital
            expenditure for infrastructure expansion -- which tends to
            be fully subsidized -- or environmental costs. Therefore,
            the actual global magnitude of networked water supply and
            sanitation subsidies is much greater than the estimation.
Complex Decisions between Care and
            Paid Work : A Qualitative Study on the Demand for Childcare
            Services in Mexico City
This study aims to improve the
            understanding of the barriers and enabling factors
            determining the demand for childcare in Mexico City. The
            study is based on focus group discussions and individual
            in-depth interviews with mothers and fathers (married or
            living in a union) of children ages zero to six years. The
            findings of this qualitative analysis confirm that for
            parents in Mexico City, decisions in favor of or against the
            use of childcare are based on: (1) the interplay between
            women's aspirations, the role of work in their lives,
            and the additional support they have; and (2) their
            perceptions of the care available, including convenience,
            overall quality, perceived opportunities for positive child
            development, and financial and non-financial costs (safety
            and risks to the child’s well-being). The findings suggest
            that significant differences exist between women with higher
            education and those with lower levels of education living in
            different parts of the city (and from different
            socioeconomic backgrounds: middle-class vis-a-vis vulnerable
            women). The observed gaps are due to differences in their
            ability to make informed choices, their aspirations and work
            opportunities, the alternative support options available to
            them, and their ability to adapt to the childcare supply.
            These results highlight the relevance of: (1) promoting a
            more balanced distribution of childcare responsibilities
            between men and women; (2) communicating more transparently
            the benefits of using childcare services and the measures
            taken to ensure the safety and positive development of
            children; and (3) adapting the childcare centers'
            functioning to the needs of working parents.
Saving for Dowry : Evidence from
            Rural India
The ancient custom of dowry, that is,
            bride-to-groom marriage payments, remains ubiquitous in many
            contemporary societies. This paper examines whether dowry
            impacted household decision making and resource allocation
            in rural India during 1986-2007. Utilizing variation in
            firstborn gender and dowry amounts across marriage markets,
            the paper finds that the prospect of higher dowry payments
            at the time of a daughter~^!!^s marriage leads parents to
            save more in advance. The higher savings are primarily
            financed through increased paternal labor supply. This
            implies that people are farsighted; they work and save more
            today with payoff in the distant future.
Big Sisters
This paper models household investments
            in young children when parents and older siblings share
            caregiving responsibilities and when investments by older
            siblings contribute to young children's human capital
            accumulation. To test the predictions of the model, the
            paper estimates the impact of having one older sister (as
            opposed to one older brother) on early childhood development
            in a sample of rural Kenyan households with otherwise
            similar family structures.  Older sibling gender is not
            related to household structure, subsequent birth spacing, or
            other observable characteristics, so the presence of an
            older girl (as opposed to an older boy) is treated as
            plausibly exogenous. Having an older sister rather than an
            older brother improves younger siblings' vocabulary and
            fine motor skills by more than 0.1 standard deviations.
            Viewed through the lens of the model, the empirical pattern
            shown here suggests that: (i) older siblings'
            investments in young children contribute to their human
            capital accumulation, and (ii) households perceive lower
            returns to investing in older girls than in older boys.
Conflict and Poverty
This paper analyzes the relationship
            between poverty and conflict in the macro and regional data,
            including a detailed case study of Uganda. The paper relies
            on a large and growing literature that provides evidence on
            the devastating impact that conflict has on health and
            expectations. Based on this evidence, it develops a
            statistical framework to track the cumulative long-term
            impact that armed conflict has on poverty, which the paper
            calls conflict debt. The data confirm that contemporaneous
            conflict leads to a conflict debt which is only recovered
            slowly. The empirical model is not only a good description
            of the cross-country aggregate poverty time-series data, but
            also regional cross-sectional data. A new aspect in the
            model is that armed conflict can prevent poverty reduction
            and, once it is over, allow for strong catch‐up effects as
            they exist in the data. But in the most conflict-ridden
            countries, repeated cycles of violence prevent poverty from
            recovering. According to the most conservative estimates,
            these countries and regions would have 5‐10 percentage
            points lower poverty rates without their conflict debt.
Feeling Poor, Feeling Rich, or
            Feeling Middle-Class : An Empirical Investigation
Based on their objective economic
            situation and comparing with their peers, individuals form
            perceptions of their economic position in a society. Data
            from the three waves of the Life in Transition surveys of
            European countries show that these perceptions
            systematically deviate from the rankings obtained using
            consumption levels. People position themselves in the middle
            ranks in larger numbers than those who are in the middle
            ranks according to their consumption levels.
            Correspondingly, many people who objectively are classified
            in the top, richest, or bottom, poorest, ranks subjectively
            feel that they are in the middle class. This puzzling
            "bunching in the middle" is the focus of this
            paper. Explanations are tested and discarded that consider
            subjective perceptions as misperceptions or the result of
            other mistakes due to data limitations (such as tail bias).
            The paper concludes that rather than reflecting a subjective
            assessment of the distribution of welfare, subjective
            rankings reveal subjective economic well-being. The paper
            show that monetary consumption is a strong predictor of
            subjective economic well-being, but that the latter is
            influenced by many other factors, including economic
            security, proxied by employment status or other measures of
            human capital, such as health and education. These findings
            have policy relevance, since redistribution measures aiming
            at simply protecting consumption levels may not be
            sufficient to restore the economic well-being provided by
            having full-time secure types of employment.
Measuring Human Capital in Europe
            and Central Asia
This paper outlines an extension of the
            Human Capital Index that addresses the specific challenges
            in education and health faced by countries in Europe and
            Central Asia. Good basic education will not be enough, as
            job markets today demand higher levels of human capital than
            in the past. As the region’s population becomes older, it is
            important that adults remain healthy to ensure productive
            aging. The Europe and Central Asia  Human Capital Index
            (ECA-HCI) extends the Human Capital Index by adding a
            measure of quality-adjusted years of higher education to the
            original education component, and it includes the prevalence
            of three adult health risk factors -- obesity, smoking, and
            heavy drinking -- as an additional proxy for latent health
            status. This extension of the Human Capital Index could also
            be useful for assessing the state of human capital in
            middle-income countries in general.
Interest Rate Repression : A New Database
Financial repression resurfaced in the
            wake of the global financial crisis and might become a
            common feature in the post Covid-19 world. To advance
            knowledge and inform policy advice, this paper presents a
            new database on interest rate controls, a popular form of
            financial repression, based on a survey of 108 countries,
            representing 88 percent of global gross domestic product.
            The data cover such aspects of interest rate controls as
            types of controls, legal basis, intended objectives,
            methodologies, and enforcement rules. In an attempt to
            provide a meaningful characterization of the data, the paper
            also provides a preliminarily estimate of the degree of
            bindingness of the interest rate control regime in a country
            and presents simple correlations with other financial
            repression policies.
Using Experimental Evidence to
            Inform Firm Support Programs in Developing Countries
Countries design programs for supporting
            firms, with varying levels of success. Firm growth is
            constrained by several factors, such as low firm
            capabilities (e.g. management), availability of finance, and
            access to markets. Based on the available experimental
            evidence on firm support programs in developing countries,
            this paper makes three broad observations. First, there are
            huge knowledge gaps in understanding the success of
            instruments that alleviate firm constraints. Various
            instruments, such as early-stage equity finance, incubators,
            and accelerators, remain untested due to the lack of good
            design, results framework, or monitoring and evaluation
            systems and so on. Second, since these interventions are
            expensive, policy makers expect such programs to be designed
            more effectively to pursue their objectives. However,
            evidence provides little guidance on the criterion for firm
            selection because the existing evaluations of instruments
            reveal little information on the heterogeneous impact by
            firm characteristics, such as the age, size, sector, and
            location of firms. Third, most interventions seek to address
            only one of the broad constraints faced by firms. To this
            end, the paper concludes with a novel proposal for a firm
            support program that attempts to sequentially address
            multiple constraints to firm growth. This program will be
            implemented in Malawi through the "Financial Inclusion
            and Entrepreneurship Scaling" project.
Promoting Parental Involvement in
            Schools : Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments
Parental involvement programs aim to
            increase school-and-parent communication and support
            children's overall learning environment. This paper
            examines the effects of low-cost, group-based parental
            involvement interventions in Mexico using data from two
            randomized controlled trials. The first experiment provided
            financial resources to parent associations. The second
            experiment provided information to parents about how to
            support their children's learning. Overall, the
            interventions induced different types of parental engagement
            in schools. The information intervention changed parenting
            behavior at home -- with large effects among indigenous
            parents who have historically been discriminated and
            socially excluded -- and improved student behavior in
            school. The grants did not impact parent or student
            behaviors. Notably, the paper does not find impacts of
            either intervention on educational achievement. To
            understand these 0 effects, the paper explores how social
            ties between parents and teachers evolved over the course of
            the two interventions. Parental involvement interventions
            led to significant changes in perceived trustworthiness
            between teachers and parents. The results suggest that
            parental involvement interventions can backfire if
            institutional rules are unclear about the expectations of
            parents and teachers as parents increase their involvement
            in schools.
From Farms to Factories and Firms :
            Structural Transformation and Labor Productivity Growth in Malaysia
This study aims to provide a
            quantitative and integrated analysis of long-term structural
            transformation and labor productivity growth in Malaysia.
            Using data from the Department of Statistics Malaysia from
            1987 to 2018 and decompositions that take account of the
            static and dynamic efficiency gains from labor reallocation,
            it documents that Malaysia has undergone structural
            transformation from an agriculture-driven to a
            services-driven economy. However, in contrast to common
            perceptions, the country's impressive growth in output
            per capita over the past three decades can largely be
            attributed not to its structural transformation but instead
            to sustained growth in within-sector labor productivity. At
            3 percent, the contribution of between-sector reallocation
            of labor to growth in output per capita in Malaysia has been
            relatively low. Accordingly, together with efforts to spur
            the more productive reallocation of labor across sectors and
            positively affect the employment rate, the main policy
            challenge for Malaysia going forward will be to achieve
            sustainable labor productivity growth within various sectors.
The Rural-Urban Divide and
            Intergenerational Educational Mobility in a Developing
            Country : Theory and Evidence from Indonesia
This paper provides an analysis of the
            rural-urban divide in intergenerational educational mobility
            in Indonesia with two distinguishing features. First, the
            estimating equations are derived from theory incorporating
            rural-urban differences in returns to education and school
            quality, and possible complementarity between parent’s
            education and financial investment. Second, the data are
            suitable for tackling the biases from sample truncation due
            to coresidency and omitted cognitive ability heterogeneity.
            The evidence rejects the workhorse linear intergenerational
            educational persistence equation in favor of a convex
            relation in rural and urban Indonesia. The rural-urban
            relative mobility curves cross, with the children of low
            educated fathers enjoying higher relative mobility in rural
            areas, while the pattern flips in favor of the urban
            children when the father has more than nine years of
            schooling. However, the rural children face lower absolute
            mobility across the whole distribution of father's
            schooling. Estimates from the investment equation suggest
            that, in urban areas, children~^!!^s peers are complementary
            to financial investment by parents, while the adult role
            models are substitutes. In contrast, separability holds in
            villages. Peers and role models are not responsible for the
            convexity in both rural and urban areas, suggesting more
            efficient investment by educated parents as a likely
            mechanism, as proposed by Becker et al. (2015, 2018). The
            theoretical relation between the intercepts of the mobility
            and investment equations helps in understand whether school
            quality is complementary to or a substitute for parental
            financial investment. This paper finds evidence of
            substitutability, implying that public investment to improve
            the quality of rural schools is desirable on both equity and
            efficiency grounds.
In Light of What They Know : How do
            Local Leaders Make Targeting Decisions
This paper analyzes how local leaders
            make targeting decisions in the context of a public workfare
            program in the Lao People~^!!^s Democratic Republic. The
            study finds that village heads are progressive in their
            targeting, prioritizing the poorer households in their
            villages. The study benchmarks this decentralized selection
            to the common alternative proxy means test method and finds
            that village heads are at least as progressive as a proxy
            means test method approach. To illuminate what
            poverty-related information village heads could plausibly be
            incorporating into their internal selection decisions, the
            study designs and administers a set of exercises for village
            heads to rank villagers on land ownership, access to
            nutrition, and experience with recent shocks -- indicators
            that are likely to differ in their observability to village
            heads and could plausibly be associated with need for public
            support.  The study finds that village heads~^!!^
            perceptions, as revealed through the ranking exercise,
            differ substantially from actual levels reported in surveys
            of the villagers themselves. The study then uses a
            data-driven machine learning approach to identify the
            predictors of village head selection.  It concludes that
            village heads rely on a combination of easily observable
            household characteristics, forming a holistic impression of
            household welfare, rather than specific indicators like
            actual land ownership, nutrition, or economic shocks.
Building Trust in the State with
            Information : Evidence from Urban Punjab
Can communication designed to increase
            support for government policy and shift perceptions of state
            capacity redress deep-rooted mistrust in state institutions?
            This paper finds providing information on past state
            effectiveness, highlighting citizens' cooperation in
            enabling past effectiveness or appealing to religious
            authorities' support for government policy have limited
            impact on support for policy, perceptions of state capacity
            and trust in the state in Pakistan. This holds true on
            average and across important dimensions of heterogeneity
            after accounting for experimenter demand. This paper
            highlights the limits of using information to build trust in
            state institutions, and the importance of measuring
            experimenter demand.
Children on the Move : Progressive
            Redistribution of Humanitarian Cash Transfers among Refugees
This paper evaluates the impact of the
            Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) in Turkey, the largest
            cash transfer program for international refugees in the
            world. The paper provides prima facie evidence that the
            program quickly caused substantial changes in household size
            and composition, with a net movement of primarily school-age
            children from larger ineligible households to smaller
            eligible ones. A sharp decline in inequality is observed in
            the entire study population: the Gini index declined by four
            percentage points (or 15 percent) within six months of
            program rollout, and the poverty headcount at the $3.20/day
            international poverty line declined by more than 50 percent
            after one year. ESSN caused a moderate increase in the
            diversity and frequency of food consumption among eligible
            households, and although there was no statistically
            significant effect on overall school enrollment, there were
            meaningful gains among the most vulnerable beneficiary
            households. To strike the right balance between transfer
            size and coverage, key parameters in the design of any cash
            transfer program, policy makers should consider the
            possibility that refugee populations may respond to their
            eligibility status by altering their household structure and
            living arrangements.