rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Do Investments in Clean Technologies
            Reduce Production Costs Insights from the Literature
In response to growing environmental
            concerns, particularly climate change, governments have
            encouraged innovation and adoption of clean technologies
            through various policy measures. At present more than half a
            trillion US dollars is being invested annually in clean
            technologies. Based on the existing literature, this study
            analyzes whether investments in clean technologies increase
            productivity. The findings are mixed.  Employing firm-level
            data, the majority of ex-post studies show a positive
            relationship between clean investments and firms’
            productivity, especially in the energy-intensive
            manufacturing sector. Most studies for the transport,
            building and power sector use an ex-ante, technology or
            sectoral level analysis instead of ex-post analysis to
            examine the economics of clean technologies. In the
            transport sector, transportation services with electricity
            or hydrogen are still more expensive than that with gasoline
            and diesel vehicles. Some studies, however, project that
            cleaner vehicles will be economically attractive within a
            decade. Many studies report that clean technologies reduce
            energy consumption and save energy bills in the building
            sector, although some studies do not agree. Most studies for
            the power sector indicate that renewable technologies have
            not yet reduced the average costs of grid electricity
            because of their intermittency and a smaller share in the
            total electricity supply.
Entry and Competition in the Market
            for Short-Cycle Programs
Short-cycle higher education programs
            form skilled human capital in two or three years and are
            eminently oriented to the labor market. While they could
            play a key role in the upskilling and reskilling of the
            workforce required for employment recovery after the
            COVID-19 pandemic, they will only do so if their supply
            responds fast and nimbly to the skill needs to local labor
            markets. This paper studies the entry, competition, and
            turnover of short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs) in
            Colombia. It documents a large expansion in the number of
            programs over the past fifteen years and studies the
            frequency of program entry and exit. It finds that the
            market for SCPs is more dynamic than the market for
            bachelor's programs, as it exhibits greater turnover or
            &#x201c;churn" of programs, with a significantly
            higher rate of program entry and exit in a given year.
            Exploiting data on local productivity and employment by
            field of study, the paper finds that SCPs are more
            responsive than bachelor's programs to changes in local
            labor demand. Among SCP providers, private and
            non-university institutions respond the most to the local
            economy. SCP entry is deterred by the presence of
            competitors and responds to cost considerations,
            particularly among private institutions. For a given
            institution, exit and entry decisions are highly correlated
            within a field of study. While enrollment is sensitive to
            the number of competitors, institutions differentiate their
            product by tuition, field, and geographic coverage. Overall,
            the evidence suggests that SCPs might indeed respond fast
            and nimbly to the local labor market needs created by the pandemic.
A Household-Level Model of Demand
            for Electricity Services and Welfare Analysis of Electricity
            Prices in Rajasthan
This paper estimates a model of
            household-level demand for electricity services and
            electricity demand in the Indian state of Rajasthan using a
            combination of household-level survey and administrative
            data.  The model incorporates customer-level demographic
            characteristics, billing cycle-level weather variables, and
            the fact that households face increasing block prices of
            electricity. The model allows estimating consumer response
            to price changes by four categories of energy services
            demand, namely, heating and cooling, lighting, and for
            domestic and business end-uses. The knowledge of demand
            response across different end-use helps in differentiating
            the impact of price changes along the income distribution.
            The model finds that the demand for heating and cooling
            energy is the most price inelastic and income elastic
            service, whereas the demand for domestic end-use is the most
            price elastic and income inelastic service of all four
            categories. The structural demand model also helps in
            comparing the welfare implications of current energy tariffs
            to those based on normative principles of efficient retail
            electricity pricing. For this analysis, first, the social
            marginal cost of electricity is calculated using publicly
            available data on generation, transmission, and distribution
            losses and emissions. The social marginal cost estimate, in
            combination with observable household characteristics, is
            then used to examine alternative tariff structures that are
            more affordable, equitable, and revenue sufficient for the
            utility than current price structure. An alternative tariff
            design, comprising of an energy price set to the social
            marginal cost of electricity and a fixed cost component
            determined by proxy indicators of household willingness to
            pay, performs better on the above parameters than the
            current schedule. Other sources of technical losses, related
            to transmission or distribution, are not studied in this paper.
Natural Disasters and the Reshaping
            of Global Value Chains
To understand the longer term
            consequences of natural disasters for global value chains,
            this paper examines trade in the automobile and electronic
            sectors after the 2011 earthquake in Japan. Contrary to
            widespread expectations, the analysis shows that the shock
            did not lead to reshoring, nearshoring, or diversification;
            and trade in intermediate products was disrupted less than
            trade in final goods. Imports did shift to new suppliers,
            especially where dependence on Japan was greater. But
            production relocated to developing countries rather than to
            other top exporters. Despite important differences, the
            observed pattern of switching may be relevant to disasters
            like the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Role of Justice in Development :
            The Data Revolution
This paper summarizes the empirical
            evidence on the role of justice in economic development,
            conflict, and trust in institutions. It finds that justice
            institutions play a significant role in economic
            development, particularly through their impact on credit
            markets and firm growth, the protection of vulnerable
            populations, their capacity to deter violence, and their
            influence over people’s trust in formal institutions. The
            paper then considers the promise of administrative data,
            machine learning, and randomized controlled trials to
            enhance the efficiency, access, and quality of justice. The
            paper concludes by discussing new avenues for research and
            the potential for data to improve the functioning of justice
            systems in the age of COVID-19.
Coding Bootcamps for Female Digital
            Employment : Evidence from an RCT in Argentina and Colombia
This paper evaluates the short-term
            causal effects of a high-quality, intensive, part-time
            computer coding bootcamp for women on skill acquisition and
            employment outcomes. Spots were offered in an oversubscribed
            coding course to a random subset of applicants in Buenos
            Aires, Argentina, and Bogotá, Colombia. The applicants who
            were chosen received a scholarship that covered most of the
            tuition costs of the course. Follow-up data collected
            shortly after the bootcamp ended  indicate that the program
            increased participants’ coding skills, as well as their
            probability of finding a job in technology. Compared with
            other jobs, technology jobs are more likely to offer
            flexible hours and work-from-home arrangements, and generate
            higher job satisfaction. These results are interpreted as an
            improvement in overall job quality. Moreover, the paper
            compares the employment situation of the sample before and
            during the first months of the COVID-19 outbreak. The
            evidence indicates that the program increased participants’
            resilience to a downturn in the labor market.
Is Investment in Preprimary
            Education Too Low Lessons from (Quasi) Experimental Evidence
            across Countries
A large body of evidence suggests
            sizeable improvements in cognitive and social-emotional
            skills and subsequent educational attainment following
            preprimary education interventions as well as increases in
            earnings later in life. Yet, while the world has nearly
            reached universal primary education, coverage of early
            childhood education is still low in many countries. This
            study uses a novel global dataset of effect sizes from more
            than 50 studies conducted in 19 countries to examine
            measures of school participation, cognitive skills,
            social-emotional skills, and behavior, both during and after
            preprimary ages. Estimates from meta-regression analysis
            suggest both strong demand for preprimary services when
            offered and significant improvements in children’s cognitive
            skills (0.15 sd) and their executive functioning,
            social-emotional learning, and behavior (0.12 sd) during the
            pre-primary period. Moreover, our meta-analytic results
            indicate statistically significant persistent advantages
            (0.07 sd) in each type of skill beyond the preprimary
            period. Pooled heterogeneous treatment effects also suggest
            higher gains for disadvantaged children. Lastly,
            cost-benefit analysis using studies from low- and
            middle-income countries implies benefit-to-cost ratios
            ranging between 1.7 and 14.2, suggesting high returns to
            preprimary investments even in contexts with limited state capacity.
Are Firm Capabilities Holding Back
            Firms in Mozambique
Firm capabilities—the abilities and
            practices to operate and innovate—are considered important
            drivers of firm performance. While the analysis of their
            importance is well established in developed countries, its
            study in the African context is more recent. The paper uses
            a new representative sample of enterprises in Mozambique
            comprising data on management and organizational practices,
            as well as skills, to study the importance of firm
            capabilities in Mozambique. The analysis suggests that the
            private sector in Mozambique scores below other developing
            countries in all dimensions of firm capabilities.
            Enterprises engaging in more contractual relationships
            demonstrate stronger firm capabilities. Firm capabilities
            are key drivers of performance; controlling for other input
            factors, firms in Mozambique with better firm capabilities
            perform better. The relationship is robust to various
            measures of performance and to including various firm and
            manager characteristics. The analysis finds that for smaller
            firms, non-exporters, and female-owned enterprises, their
            gap in business performance can be explained by differences
            in management practices. The results suggest Mozambique
            should explore mechanisms of expanding firm capabilities in
            targeted types of firms.
Financing Municipal Water and
            Sanitation Services in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements
This study estimates the impacts of two
            interventions implemented as field experiments in informal
            settlements by Nairobi&#x2019;s water and sanitation
            utility to improve revenue collection efficiency and last
            mile connection loan repayment: (i) face-to-face engagement
            between utility staff and customers to encourage payment and
            (ii) contract enforcement for service disconnection due to
            nonpayment in the form of transparent and credible
            disconnection notices. While there is no effect of the
            engagement, the study finds large effects of enforcement on
            payment. There is no effect on access to water, perceptions
            of utility fairness or quality of service delivery, on the
            relationships between tenants and property owners, or on
            tenant mental well-being nine months after the intervention.
            To counterbalance the increase in payments, property owners
            increased rental income by renting out additional space.
            Taken together these results suggest that transparent
            contract enforcement was effective at improving revenue
            collection efficiency without incurring large social or
            political costs.
Firm Productivity and Locational
            Choice : Evidence from Mozambique
Transport infrastructure is an important
            driving force for economic growth. Africa has been lagging
            behind in the global manufacturing market. Among others,
            infrastructure is often an important constraint. The paper
            reexamines the impacts of transport infrastructure on firm
            productivity in Mozambique. A conventional cost function is
            estimated with two rounds of firm data collected in 2007 and
            2018. It is found that improved transport connectivity,
            particularly access to a port, has a positive impact on firm
            production. Firm inventory is also an important determinant
            of firm productivity. Over the long term, agglomeration
            economies are also found to be significant and associated
            with port accessibility. These findings are consistent with
            the fact that the Government of Mozambique heavily invested
            in the primary road network during the first half of the
            2010s. The improved transport network is considered to have
            contributed to the country’s robust economic growth in the
            industrial and service sectors until the mid-2010s.
The Power and Roots of Aspirations :
            A Survey of the Empirical Evidence
Aspirations have become a common theme
            in empirical economics studies, but there is no unified
            understanding of the range of outcomes they influence, the
            factors that shape them, and how to measure them. This paper
            surveys this growing literature. The paper argues that there
            is compelling evidence to consider aspirations as a useful
            lens to analyze human behavior and development outcomes, at
            the individual and aggregate levels, in poorer and richer
            countries. The empirical evidence aligns with the theory
            that high aspirations can lead individuals to achieve better
            educational, labor market, and other outcomes and can
            contribute to making countries more equal and prosperous.
            The empirical evidence also confirms that the mix of social
            and circumstantial factors shaping aspirations tends to
            hinder the aspirations of the disadvantaged—such as the
            poor, immigrants, and women—and can contribute to vicious
            circles of poverty, high inequality, low social mobility,
            and low growth. However, high aspirations should not be
            considered as an end in themselves as they can backfire,
            with deleterious effects, if unmatched with opportunities.
            Further, the paper argues that definitional and measurement
            issues can affect the understanding of the topic and that
            studies should more explicitly describe their measures of
            aspirations to ensure that divergent underlying concepts are
            not mistaken.
Agglomeration Economies in
            Developing Countries : A Meta-Analysis
Recent empirical work suggests that
            there are large agglomeration gains from working and living
            in developing country cities. These estimates find that
            doubling city size is associated with an increase in
            productivity by 19 percent in China, 12 percent in India,
            and 17 percent in Africa. These agglomeration benefits are
            considerably higher relative to developed country cities,
            which are in the range of 4 to 6 percent. However, many
            developing country cities are costly, crowded, and
            disconnected, and face slow structural transformation. To
            understand the true productivity advantages of cities in
            developing countries, this paper systematically evaluates
            more than 1,200 elasticity estimates from 70 studies in 33
            countries. Using a frontier methodology for conducting
            meta-analysis, it finds that the elasticity estimates in
            developing countries are at most 1 percentage point higher
            than in advanced economies, but not significantly so. The
            paper provides novel estimates of the elasticity of
            pollution, homicide, and congestion, using a large sample of
            developing and developed country cities. No evidence is
            found for productivity gains in light of the high and
            increasing costs of working in developing country cities.
Agglomeration Economies in
            Developing Countries : A Meta-Analysis
Policy Research Working Paper 9730 Agglomeration Economies in Developing Countries A Meta-Analysis _Arti Grover Somik V. Lall Jonathan Timmis_ Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice & East Asia and the Pacific Region Office of the Chief Economist July 2021
Gender Differences in Economics
            Course-Taking and Majoring : Findings from an RCT
This paper reports on gender differences
            in responses to a randomized controlled trial that provided
            encouragement and information nudges to take subsequent
            economics courses and major in the subject for students
            enrolled in large introductory economics classes at a large
            elite public university. Two treatments combined
            encouragement to major in economics with information on
            either financial or prosocial returns to the major. Men
            receiving either treatment were more likely to take an
            additional economics course, but not to major in economics.
            In contrast, the treatments were not estimated to
            significantly affect women’s course-taking and majoring. Two
            treatment mediators are also examined: expected versus
            actual grade and having a female teaching assistant. There
            were also differing effects of mediators on treatment
            responses for men and women. Women were more nudge-able to
            take another course when they received a
            better-than-expected introductory class grade, and men were
            more nudge-able to take another course when they had a
            female teaching assistant.
Migration, Economic Crisis and Child
            Growth in Rural Guatemala : Insights from the Great Recession
Migration has been demonstrated by
            various studies to be closely linked to improvements in
            individual- and household-level outcomes. Rather than
            examining the effects of migration, this paper explores
            whether an economic shock in United States negatively
            affected migrant households in rural Guatemala. Treating the
            Great Recession as a natural experiment affecting migrant
            and non-migrant households differently, the paper puts the
            spotlight on the effect on child anthropometry, including
            longer-term indicators of height-for-age z-scores. Panel
            data on children and multiple children in households enable
            double- and triple-difference estimation. In relative terms,
            migrant households fared far worse than non-migrant
            households over the period. In particular, large advantages
            in child anthropometric status for the youngest children in
            migrant households in 2008, just prior to the crisis, were
            substantially diminished four years later. The findings
            underscore the possible fragility of the benefits of
            migration, particularly in the face of a substantial
            economic shock, and point to the potential importance of
            deepening social safety nets.
Women’s Economic Participation, Time
            Use, and Access to Childcare in Urban Bangladesh
This study documents the labor market
            outcomes and time-use patterns of women in urban Bangladesh.
            Using survey data collected in 2018 in low-income
            neighborhoods of Dhaka, the paper finds that women with
            children aged 0–5 years have lower likelihood of labor
            market participation, lower likelihood of working, and lower
            likelihood of being an earner, compared to women with no
            children and women with children aged 6 years or older.
            While this motherhood penalty affects all mothers, those who
            have young children but have no access to childcare support
            face the largest penalty. Time-use patterns confirm these
            findings, indicating that mothers of young children with no
            access to childcare spend less time on market work, more
            time on unpaid work, and less time on leisure or other
            activities. In addition, they are more likely to perform
            childcare as a secondary activity along with other paid and
            unpaid work, which may have implications for their
            productivity and the quality of care provided to children.
            The paper proposes entry points to ease the double burden of
            paid and unpaid care work on mothers in urban areas, where
            the availability and affordability of formal childcare
            services is low, and community-based or other informal care
            arrangements are not common.