rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Learning to Navigate a New Financial
            Technology : Evidence from Payroll Accounts
How do inexperienced consumers learn to
            use a new financial technology? This paper presents results
            from a field experiment that introduced payroll accounts in
            a population of largely unbanked factory workers in
            Bangladesh. In the experiment, workers in a treatment group
            received monthly wage payments into a bank or mobile money
            account while workers in a control group continued to
            receive wages in cash, with a subset also receiving an
            account without automatic wage payments. The results show
            that exposure to payroll accounts leads to increased account
            use and consumer learning. Those receiving accounts with
            automatic wage payments learn to use the account without
            assistance, begin to use a wider set of account features,
            and learn to avoid illicit fees, which are common in
            emerging markets for consumer finance. The treatments have
            real effects, leading to increased savings and improvements
            in the ability to cope with unanticipated economic shocks.
            An additional audit study provides suggestive evidence of
            market externalities from consumer learning: mobile money
            agents are less likely to overcharge inexperienced customers
            in areas with higher levels of payroll account adoption.
            This suggests potentially important equilibrium effects of
            introducing accounts at scale.
Texting Parents about Early Child
            Development : Behavioral Changes and Unintended Social Effects
Parenting interventions have the
            potential to improve early childhood development. Text
            messages are considered a promising channel to deliver
            parenting information at large scale. This paper tests
            whether sending text messages about parenting practices
            impacts early childhood development. Households in rural
            Nicaragua were randomly assigned to receive messages about
            nutrition, health, stimulation, or the home environment. The
            intervention led to significant changes in self-reported
            parenting practices. However, it did not translate into
            improvements in children's cognitive development. When
            local opinion leaders were randomly exposed to the same text
            message intervention, parental investments declined and
            children's outcomes deteriorated. Since interactions
            between parents and leaders about child development also
            decreased, the negative effects may have resulted from a
            crowding-out of some local leaders.
Data Transparency and Growth in
            Developing Economies during and after the Global Financial Crisis
The study explores the effects of data
            transparency on economic growth for developing economies
            over a unique time period &#x2014; at the onset of the
            2007&#x2013;2009 global financial crisis and thereafter.
            Data transparency is defined as the timely production of
            credible statistics as measured by the Statistical Capacity
            Indicator. The paper finds that data transparency has a
            positive effect on real gross domestic product per capita
            during a period of considerable uncertainty. The estimates
            indicate an elasticity of the magnitude of 0.03 percent per
            year, which is much larger than the elasticity of trade
            openness and schooling in the estimation sample. The
            empirics employ a variety of econometric estimators,
            including dynamic panel and cross-sectional instrumental
            variables estimators, with the latter approach yielding a
            higher estimated elasticity. The findings are robust to the
            inclusion of several factors in addition to political
            institutions and exogenous commodity-price and external
            debt-financing shocks.
Economic Growth in European Union
            NUTS-3 Regions
This paper analyzes the growth pathways
            of 1,321 regions in the European Union from 2003 to 2017.
            The aim is to inform integrated territorial investments and
            other economic development initiatives in lagging regions.
            Using the definition of lagging regions from the European
            Commission’s Catching Up Initiative, more than two-thirds of
            the European Union member states have lagging regions when
            defined at the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for
            Statistics-3 scale. These small lagging regions are often
            hidden within larger and more prosperous regions. The paper
            considers the roles of industrial structure, innovation, and
            inward foreign direct investment as growth-enhancing
            factors. The findings indicate that the growth dynamics in
            low-income regions are different from those in regions in
            other income groups: there is no overall pattern in the
            contribution of industry to growth but there is a strong
            association between foreign direct investment and growth.
            Among low-growth lagging regions -- the 171 small regions in
            the European Union with gross domestic product per capita
            less than 90 percent of the European Union average, and
            stagnant or negative growth performance -- growth is
            correlated with construction and innovation. There are also
            differences in the growth pathways of rural and non-rural
            regions: growth is associated with moving away from
            agriculture in rural regions, and it is associated with
            construction and innovation in non-rural regions. The
            results imply that a finer geographic scale can be important
            in policy making and programming of Cohesion Policy Funds,
            to cater to different needs and opportunities at the scale
            of Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics-3 regions.
Taking Stock of the Financial Sector
            Policy Response to COVID-19 around the World
This paper introduces a new global
            database and a policy classification framework that records
            the financial sector policy response to the COVID-19
            pandemic across 154 jurisdictions. It documents that
            authorities around the world have taken a diverse array of
            measures to mitigate financial distress in markets and for
            borrowers, and to support the provision of critical
            financial services to the real economy. Measures that focus
            on the banking sector constitute the majority of policies
            taken and aim to take advantage of the flexibility embedded
            in the international standards. However, emerging markets
            and developing economies tend to rely more on prudential
            measures that go beyond this embedded flexibility compared
            with advanced economies, which may reduce bank balance sheet
            transparency and increase risks. Using Cox proportional
            hazards and Poisson regressions, the paper takes initial
            steps to analyze the determinants of policy makersâ€™
            responsiveness and activity in emerging markets and
            developing economies, respectively. The results indicate
            that policy makers have typically been significantly more
            responsive and have taken more policy measures in emerging
            markets and developing economies that are richer and more
            populous. Countries with higher private debt levels tend to
            respond earlier with banking sector and liquidity and
            funding measures. The spread of COVID-19, macro-financial
            fundamentals, and fiscal and containment policies appear to
            play a limited role. In a substantially smaller sample, the
            paper explores the role of banking characteristics and finds
            that emerging markets and developing economies with higher
            private credit levels and that have adopted Basel III
            features have taken fewer policy measures. Future work is
            necessary for better understanding the country determinants
            of the policy response as well as the effectiveness and
            potential unintended consequences of the measures.
Trade Policy Responses to the
            COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis : Evidence from a New Data Set
This paper presents new high-frequency
            data on trade policy changes targeting medical and food
            products since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic,
            documenting how countries used trade policy instruments in
            response to the health crisis on a week-by-week basis. The
            data set reveals a rapid increase in trade policy activism
            in February and March 2020 in tandem with the rise in
            COVID-19 cases, but also uncovers extensive heterogeneity
            across countries in their use of trade policy and the types
            of measures used. Some countries acted to restrict exports
            and facilitate imports, others targeted only one of these
            margins, and many did not use trade policy at all. The
            observed heterogeneity suggests numerous research questions
            on the drivers of trade policy responses to COVID-19, the
            effects of these measures on trade and prices of critical
            products, and the role of trade agreements in influencing
            trade activism.
Trade Policy Responses to the
            COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis : Evidence from a New Data Set
Policy Research Working Paper 9498

# Trade Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis

Evidence from a New Data Set _Simon Evenett Matteo Fiorini Johannes Fritz Bernard Hoekman Piotr Lukaszuk Nadia Rocha Michele Ruta Filippo Santi Anirudh Shingal_ Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice December 2020
Do Immigrants Shield the Locals
            Exposure to COVID-Related Risks in the European Union
This paper investigates the relationship
            between immigration and the exposure of native workers to
            the health and labor-market risks arising from the COVID-19
            pandemic. Using various measures of occupational risks based
            on European Union labor force survey data, the paper finds
            that immigrant workers, especially those from lower-income
            member countries in Eastern Europe or from outside the EU,
            face greater exposure than their native-born peers to both
            income and health-shocks related to COVID-19. The paper also
            shows that native workers living in regions with a higher
            concentration of immigrants are less exposed to some of the
            income and health risks associated with the pandemic. To
            assess whether this relationship is causal, a Bartik-type
            shift-share instrument is used to control for potential bias
            and unobservable factors that would lead migrants to
            self-select into more vulnerable occupations across regions.
            The results show that the presence of immigrant workers has
            a causal effect in reducing the exposure of native workers
            to various risks by enabling the native-born workers to move
            into jobs that could be undertaken from the safety of their
            homes or with lower face-to-face interactions. The effects
            on the native-born population are more pronounced for
            high-skilled workers than for low-skilled workers, and for
            women than for men. The paper does not find a significant
            effect of immigration on wages and employment — indicating
            that the effects are mostly driven by a reallocation of
            natives from less safe jobs to safer jobs.
Bilateral International Investments
            : The Big Sur
Using country-to-country data, this
            paper documents a set of novel stylized facts about the rise
            of the South in global finance. The paper assembles
            comprehensive bilateral data on cross-border bank loans and
            deposits, portfolio investment in debt and equity, foreign
            direct investment, and international reserves. The main
            finding is that global financial integration with and
            especially within the South (countries outside the G7 and
            Western Europe) has grown faster than within the North. By
            2018, the South accounted for 24 to 40 percent of
            international loans and deposits, portfolio investment, and
            foreign direct investment, an increase of roughly 10
            percentage points since 2001. The growing importance of the
            South is reflected in the intensive and extensive margins,
            with fast growth in the number of bilateral links. Although
            China weighs heavily in these trends, international
            investment in the rest of the South has increased to a
            similar extent.
Improving Business Practices and the
            Boundary of the Entrepreneur : A Randomized Experiment
            Comparing Training, Consulting, Insourcing and Outsourcing
Many small firms lack the finance and
            marketing skills needed for firm growth. The standard
            approach in many business support programs is to attempt to
            train the entrepreneur to develop these skills, through
            classroom-based training or personalized consulting.
            However, rather than requiring the entrepreneur to be a
            jack-of-all-trades, an alternative is to move beyond the
            boundary of the entrepreneur and link firms to these skills
            in a marketplace through insourcing workers with functional
            expertise or outsourcing tasks to professional specialists.
            A randomized experiment in Nigeria tests the relative
            effectiveness of these four different approaches to
            improving business practices. Insourcing and outsourcing
            both dominate business training; and do at least as well as
            business consulting at one-half of the cost. Moving beyond
            the entrepreneurial boundary enables firms to use higher
            quality digital marketing practices, innovate more, and
            achieve greater sales and profits growth over a two-year horizon.
Improving Business Practices and the
            Boundary of the Entrepreneur : A Randomized Experiment
            Comparing Training, Consulting, Insourcing and Outsourcing
Policy Research Working Paper 9502 Improving Business Practices and the Boundary of the Entrepreneur A Randomized Experiment Comparing Training, Consulting, Insourcing and Outsourcing _Stephen J. Anderson David McKenzie_ Development Economics Development Research Group December 2020
Impacts of COVID-19 on Household
            Welfare in Tunisia
COVID-19 is likely to have a large
            impact on the welfare of Tunisian households. First, some
            individuals might be more vulnerable to contracting the
            disease because their living conditions or jobs make them
            more susceptible to meeting others or practicing social
            distancing. Lack of adequate access to health insurance,
            overcrowded living conditions, and low access to water at
            home are reasons that make the Tunisian poor more
            susceptible to getting infected or not being able to seek
            health care in the event that they contract COVID-19. In
            addition, the elderly in the poorest households could be
            more susceptible to COVID-19 due to higher prevalence of
            intergenerational households among the poor. Second, many
            sectors of the labor market have experienced an economic
            slowdown, and those employed in these sectors are likely to
            experience disproportionate effects. Combining the labor
            shock and price shock simultaneously, the simulations in
            this paper show an increase in poverty of 7.3 percentage
            points under a more optimistic scenario and 11.9 percentage
            points under the pessimistic scenario, and individuals in
            sectors such as tourism and construction are expected to
            fall into poverty due to COVID-19. The paper estimates that
            the government’s compensatory measures targeted toward the
            hardest hit are expected to mitigate the increase in
            poverty. Specifically, the increase in poverty will be 6.5
            percentage points under the optimistic scenario if
            mitigation measures are in place vis-à-vis in their absence,
            when the increase in poverty is 7.3 percentage points.
The Impact of Flooding on Urban
            Transit and Accessibility : A Case Study of Kinshasa
Transportation networks underpin
            socioeconomic development by enabling the movement of goods
            and people. However, little is known about how flooding
            disrupts transportation systems in urban areas in developing
            country cities, despite these natural disasters occurring
            frequently. This study documents the channels through which
            regular flooding in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of
            Congo, impacts transport services, commuters' ability
            to reach their jobs, and the associated economic opportunity
            costs from travel delays. This assessment is based on
            transit feed specification data sets collected specifically
            for this analysis under normal and flooded conditions. These
            data sets were combined with travel survey data containing
            travelers' socioeconomic attributes and trip
            parameters, as well as a high-resolution flood maps. The
            results show that (1) flood disruptions cause increases in
            public transit headways and transit re-routing, decreases in
            travel speeds, and thus travel time delays, which translate
            into substantial economic costs to local commuters; (2)
            accessibility to jobs decreases under flooded conditions,
            hindering the establishment of an integrated citywide labor
            market; (3) there are spatial clusters where some of the
            poorest commuters experience among the highest travel
            delays, highlighting socio-spatial equity aspects of floods;
            (4) certain road segments are critical for the transport
            network and should be prioritized for resilience measures;
            and (5) the estimated daily cost of flood disruption to
            commuters’ trips in Kinshasa is $1,166,000. The findings of
            this assessment provide disaster mitigation guidance to the
            Office des Voiries et Drainage under the Ministry of
            Infrastructure, as well as strategic investment
            recommendations to the Ministry of Housing and Planning.
Macroeconomic Modeling of Managing
            Hurricane Damage in the Caribbean : The Case of Jamaica
This paper describes a modeling
            methodology that embeds climate damages from natural
            disasters and risk management strategies into a
            macroeconomic model for Jamaica. The modeled damages take
            the form of capital destruction, and the risk management
            strategies considered are (i) adaptation investment in
            hurricane resilient infrastructure, (ii) commercial disaster
            insurance for the government, (iii) the formation of a
            contingency fund, and (iv) lower debt via higher future
            primary balances to create fiscal space for disaster
            recovery. Different risk management strategies are compared
            to a baseline of no risk management. The model behavior is
            estimated empirically on country-specific data. Hurricane
            damage and the model results are analyzed in deterministic
            and probabilistic settings, using the historical
            distribution of damages for Jamaica.
Policies to Support Businesses
            through the COVID-19 Shock : A Firm-Level Perspective
Relying on a novel dataset covering more
            than 120,000 firms in 60 countries, this paper con-tributes
            to the debate about D policies to support businesses through
            the COVID-19 pandemic. While governments around the world
            have implemented a wide range of policy support measures,
            evidence on the reach of these policies, the alignment of
            measures with firm needs, and their targeting and
            effectiveness remains scarce. This paper provides the most
            comprehensive assessment to date of these issues, focusing
            primarily on the developing economies. It shows that policy
            reach has been limited, especially for the more vulnerable
            firms and countries, and identifies mismatches between
            policies provided and policies most sought. It also provides
            some indicative evidence regarding mistargeting of policies
            and their effectiveness in addressing liquidity constraints
            and preventing layoffs. This assessment provides some early
            guidance to policymakers on tailoring their COVID-19
            business support packages and points to new directions in
            data and research efforts needed to guide policy responses
            to the current pandemic and future crises.
Policies to Support Businesses
            through the COVID-19 Shock : A Firm-Level Perspective
Policy Research Working Paper 9506 Policies to Support Businesses through the COVID-19 Shock A Firm-Level Perspective _Xavier Cirera Marcio Cruz Elwyn Davies Arti Grover Leonardo Iacovone Jose Ernesto Lopez Cordova Denis Medvedev Franklin Okechukwu Maduko Gaurav Nayyar Santiago Reyes Ortega Jesica Torres_ Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice January 2021