rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Welfare and Fiscal Implications from
            Increased Gasoline Prices in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Facing a fiscal crisis, the Islamic
            Republic of Iran decided to increase gasoline prices at the
            end of 2019. This paper estimates the impact of the price
            increase on household welfare and government revenue, using
            the most recent Household Expenditure and Income Survey
            conducted by the Statistical Center of Iran in March
            2018-March 2019. The paper looks at the direct and indirect
            impacts of the reform and quantifies the compensatory cash
            transfer program the government instituted. Despite very
            regressive gasoline subsidies benefitting the rich the most,
            the increase in gasoline prices is found to affect the poor
            to a greater extent due to larger negative indirect impacts
            as well as their relatively low incomes.  In total, poverty
            is estimated to increase by about 2.9 percentage points,
            with the direct impact accounting for a third of this
            increase. The proposed government scheme, if targeted
            perfectly to the poorest 18 million households, would fully
            compensate the poorest bottom 50 percent of the population
            and reduce poverty to below pre-reform levels. The annual
            cost of the program will be around 338 trillion rials, which
            accounts for 77 percent of the estimated total savings from
            the subsidies reform (439 trillion rials).
Financing Firms in Hibernation
            during the COVID-19 Pandemic
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic
            halted economic activity worldwide, hurting firms and
            pushing many of them toward bankruptcy. This paper discusses
            four central issues that have emerged in the academic and
            policy debates related to firm financing during the
            downturn. First, the economic crisis triggered by the
            pandemic is radically different from past crises, with
            important consequences for optimal policy responses. Second,
            it is important to preserve firms' relationships with
            key stakeholders (like workers, suppliers, customers, and
            creditors) to avoid inefficient bankruptcies and long-term
            detrimental economic effects. Third, firms can benefit from
            "hibernation," incurring the minimum bare expenses
            necessary to withstand the pandemic, while using credit if
            needed to remain alive until the crisis subdues. Fourth, the
            existing legal and regulatory infrastructure is ill-equipped
            to deal with an exogenous systemic shock like a pandemic.
            Financial sector policies can help increase the provision of
            credit, while posing difficult choices and trade-offs.
Once NEET, Always NEET A Synthetic
            Panel Approach to Analyze the Moroccan Labor Market
In many regions of the world, the
            persistent, and growing, proportion of young people who are
            currently not in employment, education, or training is of
            global concern. This is no less true of Morocco: about 30
            percent of the Moroccan population between ages 15 and 24
            are currently not in employment, education, or training.
            Drawing from various rounds of Moroccan labor force surveys,
            this paper contributes to understanding the complex dynamics
            of labor markets in developing countries. First, it
            identifies the socioeconomic determinants of Morocco's
            young population not in employment, education, or training.
            Second, employing a synthetic panel methodology in the
            context of labor market analysis, the paper describes how
            the conditions of individuals in this group has changed over
            time. One striking, and worrisome, pattern that emerges from
            the 2010 synthetic panel data is that, even after 10 years,
            a majority of the young population not in employment,
            education, or training remained outside the labor market or
            education, with very little chance of moving out of their
            situation. Their chronic stagnancy confirms the powerful
            effect that initial conditions have on determining young
            people's future outcomes.
Survival of Firms during Economic Crisis
This paper estimates the survival time
            of nearly 7,000 firms in a dozen high-income and
            middle-income countries in a scenario of extreme economic
            distress, using the World Bank's Enterprises Surveys.
            Under the assumption that firms have no incoming revenues
            and cover only fixed costs, the median survival time across
            industries ranges within 8 to 19 weeks, while on average
            firms have liquidity to survive between 12 and 38 weeks.
            Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction is not
            corroborated in the data, as potential exit is not
            predicated on the size of firms, their age, or their productivity.
Jobs' Amenability to Working
            from Home : Evidence from Skills Surveys for 53 Countries :
            Jobs' Amenability to Working from Home : Evidence from
            Skills Surveys for 53 Countries
The spread of COVID-19 and
            implementation of "social distancing" policies
            around the world have raised the question of how many jobs
            can be done at home. This paper uses skills surveys from 53
            countries at varying levels of economic development to
            estimate jobs' amenability to working from home. The
            paper considers jobs' characteristics and uses internet
            access at home as an important determinant of working from
            home. The findings indicate that the amenability of jobs to
            working from home increases with the level of economic
            development of the country. This is driven by jobs in poor
            countries being more intensive in physical/manual tasks,
            using less information and communications technology, and
            having poorer internet connectivity at home. Women, college
            graduates, and salaried and formal workers have jobs that
            are more amenable to working from home than the average
            worker. The opposite holds for workers in hotels and
            restaurants, construction, agriculture, and commerce. The
            paper finds that the crisis may exacerbate inequities
            between and within countries. It also finds that occupations
            explain less than half of the variability in the
            working-from-home indexes within countries, which highlights
            the importance of using individual-level data to assess
            jobs’ amenability to working from home.
Early-Life Access to a Basic Health
            Care Program and Adult Outcomes in Indonesia
Access to primary care during early life
            can have substantial benefits in developing countries. This
            study evaluates the long-run impact of the Village Midwife
            Program in Indonesia. It utilizes the roll-out-variation of
            the program and link individual background and community
            characteristics in early childhood to adult outcomes in the
            Indonesian Family Life Survey. It finds that the presence of
            a midwife in a community in utero leads to an improvement in
            overall health, cognition, and economic outcomes among men,
            but not for women. Greater receipt of antenatal care and
            skilled birth-attendance could, in part, drive these results.
Cross-Region Transfers in a Monetary
            Union : Evidence from the US and Some Implications
US federal transfers to individuals are
            large, countercyclical, vary geographically, and are often
            credited for helping stabilize regional economies. This
            paper estimates the short-run effects of these transfers
            using plausibly exogenous regional variation in temporary
            stimulus packages and earlier permanent Social Security
            increases. States that received larger transfers tended to
            grow faster contemporaneously, with a multiplier of around
            1.5 for permanent transfers and 1/3 for temporary transfers.
            Results are broadly consistent with an open-economy New
            Keynesian model. At business-cycle frequencies, cross-region
            transfer multipliers are not large, suggesting only modest
            gains in regional stabilization from US federal automatic stabilizers.
Study of the Distributional
            Performance of Piped Water Consumption Subsidies in 10
            Developing Countries
This paper provides new evidence on how
            effectively piped water consumption subsidies are targeting
            poor households in 10 low- and middle-income countries
            around the world. The results suggest that, in these
            countries, existing tariff structures fall short of
            recovering the costs of service provision, and the resulting
            subsidies largely fail to achieve their goal of improving
            the accessibility and affordability of piped water for poor
            households. Instead, the majority of subsidies in all 10
            countries are captured by the richest households. This is in
            part because the most vulnerable population segments
            typically face challenges in accessing and connecting to
            piped water services. The paper also reveals shortcomings in
            the design of the subsidies, which are conditional on poor
            households being connected to a piped network.
Locking Crops to Unlock Investment :
            Experimental Evidence on Warrantage in Burkina Faso
Financial market imperfections remain
            pervasive in developing countries, constraining potentially
            profitable investment decisions, especially for rural
            smallholder farmers. Warrantage is an innovative model of
            rural finance with the potential to overcome credit,
            storage, and commitment constraints through a localized
            inventory credit scheme. Exploiting random variations in
            household access to warrantage and intensity of access
            across villages, this paper studies the direct impact of
            this scheme on beneficiaries as well as its spillover
            effects. Take-up of storage is high (94 percent), while
            credit take-up is moderate (38 percent). Households with
            access to warrantage primarily store sorghum and maize and
            sell their production over an extended period of time,
            earning higher average prices and resulting in higher sales
            revenue ($248, or 33 percent, on average). Increased incomes
            are spent on long-term investments, including human capital
            expenditures (education), livestock purchases, and
            investment in agricultural inputs for the subsequent year.
A Multiple-Arm, Cluster-Randomized
            Impact Evaluation of the Clean India (Swachh Bharat) Mission
            Program in Rural Punjab, India
This study reports the findings of a
            large-scale, multiple-arm, cluster-randomized control study
            carried out in rural Punjab, India, to assess the impact of
            a flagship sanitation program of the Government of India.
            The program, the Clean India Mission for Villages, was
            implemented between October 2014 and October 2019 and aimed
            to encourage the construction of toilets, eliminate the
            practice of open defecation, and improve the awareness and
            practice of good hygiene across rural India. It utilized a
            combination of behavioral change campaigns, centered on the
            community-led total sanitation approach, and financial
            incentives for eligible households. The study also evaluates
            the incremental effects of intensive hygiene awareness
            campaigns in selected schools and follow-up initiatives in
            selected communities. The study finds that the coverage of
            “safely managed” toilets among households without toilets
            increased by 6.8–10.4 percentage points across various
            intervention arms, compared with a control group. Open
            defecation was reduced by 7.3–7.8 percentage points. The
            program also had significant positive impacts on hygiene
            awareness among adults and children, although the
            interventions of school campaigns and intensive follow-up
            were of limited additional impact.
Gender Bias and Intergenerational
            Educational Mobility : Theory and Evidence from China and India
This paper incorporates gender bias
            against girls in the family, school and labor market in a
            model of intergenerational persistence in schooling where
            parents self-finance children's education because of
            credit market imperfections. Parents may underestimate a
            girl's ability, expect lower returns, and assign lower
            weights to their welfare (“pure son preference”). The model
            delivers the widely used linear conditional expectation
            function under constant returns and separability but
            generates an irrelevance result: parental bias does not
            affect relative mobility. With diminishing returns and
            complementarity, the conditional expectation function can be
            concave or convex, and parental bias affects both relative
            and absolute mobility. This paper tests these predictions in
            India and China using data not subject to coresidency bias.
            The evidence rejects the linear conditional expectation
            function in rural and urban India in favor of a concave
            relation. Girls in India face lower mobility irrespective of
            location when born to fathers with low schooling, but the
            gender gap closes when the father is college educated. In
            China, the conditional expectation function is convex for
            sons in urban areas, but linear in all other cases. The
            convexity supports the complementarity hypothesis of Becker
            et al. (2018) for the urban sons and leads to gender
            divergence in relative mobility for the children of highly
            educated fathers. In urban China, and urban and rural India,
            the mechanisms are underestimation of the ability of girls
            and unfavorable school environment. There is some evidence
            of pure son preference in rural India. The girls in rural
            China do not face bias in financial investment by parents,
            but they still face lower mobility when born to uneducated
            parents. Gender barriers in rural schools seem to be the
            primary mechanism.
Transformational Climate Finance :
            Donors' Willingness to Support Deep and
            Transformational Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions in
            Lower-Income Countries
This paper uses simple analytical models
            to study high-income donor countries' willingness to
            pay to supply mitigation finance to low-income countries;
            how this depends on modality for finance supply; and how it
            changes as the global greenhouse gas mitigation agenda moves
            forward. The paper focuses on two modalities:
            transformational project-based mitigation finance
            (transitioning from fossil to non-fossil energy use at
            scale), and transformational policy-based mitigation finance
            support (implementing comprehensive carbon taxation). These
            modalities are compared with conventional finance for which
            donors have lower willingness to pay. High-income
            countries' willingness to pay is higher when mitigation
            is combined with carbon taxation; private-sector finance is
            also more highly incentivized. Reaching the transformational
            mitigation finance stage can be challenging, as it may
            require large provision of mitigation finance with negative
            net returns to high-income countries. Willingness to pay
            will be higher when high-income countries collaborate in the
            provision of mitigation finance. The findings show that more
            effective collaboration can be sustained when it is enforced
            by an international financial institution that collects and
            spends the provided mitigation finance to induce efficient
            mitigation activity in low-income countries and
            collaboration among donors is enforced by simple tit-for-tat
            reaction strategies.
Remote-learning, Time-Use, and
            Mental Health of Ecuadorian High-School Studentsduring the
            COVID-19 Quarantine
The COVID-19 pandemic has closed schools
            around the world, forcing school systems and students to
            quickly attempt remote learning. A rapid response phone
            survey of over 1,500 high school students aged 14 to 18 in
            Ecuador was conducted to learn how students spend their time
            during the period of quarantine, examine their access to
            remote learning, and measure their mental health status. The
            data show that 59 percent of students have both an internet
            connection at home and a computer or tablet, 74 percent are
            engaging in some online or telelearning, and 86 percent have
            done some schoolwork on the last weekday. Detailed time-use
            data show most students have established similar daily
            routines around education, although gender and wealth
            differences emerge in time spent working and on household
            tasks. Closure of schools and social isolation are the two
            main problems students say they face, and while the majority
            are mostly happy, 16 percent have mental health scores that
            indicate depression.
Covid-19 and Food Protectionism :
            The Impact of the Pandemic and Export Restrictions on World
            Food Markets
This paper analyzes the impact of
            Covid-19 and uncooperative trade policies on world food
            markets. It quantifies the initial shock due to the pandemic
            under the assumption that products that are more labor
            intensive in production are more affected through
            workers' morbidity and containment policies. It then
            estimates how escalating export restrictions to shield
            domestic food markets could magnify the initial shock. The
            analysis shows that, in the quarter following the outbreak
            of the pandemic, the global export supply of food could
            decrease between 6 and 20 percent and global prices increase
            between 2 and 6 percent on average. Escalating export
            restrictions would multiply the initial shock by a factor of
            3, with world food prices rising by up to 18 percent on
            average. Import food dependent countries, which are in large
            majority developing and least developed countries, would be
            most affected.
Does Better Information Curb Customs Fraud
This paper examines how providing better
            information to customs inspectors and monitoring their
            actions affects tax revenue and fraud detection in
            Madagascar. First, an instrumental variables strategy is
            used to show that transaction-specific, third-party
            valuation advice on a subset of high-risk import
            declarations increases fraud findings by 21.7 percentage
            points and tax collection by 5.2 percentage points. Second,
            a randomized control trial is conducted in which a subset of
            high-risk declarations is selected to receive detailed risk
            comments and another subset is explicitly tagged for ex-post
            monitoring. For declarations not subject to third-party
            valuation advice, detailed comments increase reporting of
            fraud by 3.1 percentage points and improve tax yield by 1
            percentage point. However, valuation advice and detailed
            comments have a significantly smaller impact on revenue when
            potential tax losses and opportunities for graft are large.
            Monitoring induces inspectors to scan more shipments but
            does not result in the detection of more fraud or the
            collection of additional revenue. Better information thus
            helps curb customs fraud, but its effectiveness appears
            compromised by corruption.
Pull Your Small Area Estimates up by
            the Bootstraps
After almost two decades of poverty maps
            produced by the World Bank and multiple advances in the
            literature, this paper presents a methodological update to
            the World Bank's toolkit for small area estimation. The
            paper reviews the computational procedures of the current
            methods used by the World Bank: the traditional approach by
            Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw (2003) and the Empirical
            Best/Bayes (EB) addition introduced by Van der Weide (2014).
            The addition extends the EB procedure of Molina and Rao
            (2010) by considering heteroscedasticity and includes survey
            weights, but uses a different bootstrap approach, here
            referred to as clustered bootstrap. Simulation experiments
            comparing these methods to the original EB approach of
            Molina and Rao (2010) provide empirical evidence of the
            shortcomings of the clustered bootstrap approach, which
            yields biased point estimates. The main contributions of
            this paper are then two: 1) to adapt the original Monte
            Carlo simulation procedure of Molina and Rao (2010) for the
            approximation of the extended EB estimators that include
            heteroscedasticity and survey weights as in Van der Weide
            (2014); and 2) to adapt the parametric bootstrap approach
            for mean squared error (MSE) estimation considered by Molina
            and Rao (2010), and proposed originally by González-Manteiga
            et al. (2008), to these extended EB estimators. Simulation
            experiments illustrate that the revised Monte Carlo
            simulation method yields estimators that are considerably
            less biased and more efficient in terms of MSE than those
            obtained from the clustered bootstrap approach, and that the
            parametric bootstrap MSE estimators are in line with the
            true MSEs under realistic scenarios.