rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Mind the gap a rural-urban
            comparison of manufacturing firms
This paper compares and contrasts the
            performance of rural and urban manufacturing firms in
            Ethiopia to assess the impact of market integration and the
            investment climate on firm performance. Rural firms are
            shown to operate in isolated markets, have poor access to
            infrastructure and a substantial degree of market power,
            whereas urban firms operate in better integrated and more
            competitive markets, where they have much better access to
            inputs. Fragmentation may also help explain why urban firms
            are much larger, much more capital intensive and why they
            produce much more output per worker. Capital intensity and
            labor productivity are strongly correlated with firm size.
            Manufacturing technology choice does not vary strongly
            across space and increasing returns to scale are modest at
            best, suggesting that rural-urban differences in output per
            worker are predominantly driven by differences in capital
            intensity and Total Factor Productivity (TFP). The average
            TFP of firms in rural towns is much higher than that of
            rural firms in remote areas, but small firms in rural towns
            are not significantly less productive than small firms in
            other urban areas. A key finding of the paper is that market
            fragmentation and investment climate constraints impair the
            growth of the rural non-farm sector. Whereas urban firms
            exhibit a healthy dynamism, rural firms are stagnant and
            lack incentives to invest. Paradoxically, limited local
            demand due to market fragmentation is the most pressing
            constraint for rural firms, even though they face more
            severe supply-side constraints than urban firms. Promoting
            market towns in Ethiopia might be an effective means of
            capitalizing on the gains from market integration.
A structural model of establishment
            and industry evolution : evidence from Chile
Many recent models have been developed
            to fit the basic facts on establishment and industry
            evolution. While these models yield a simple interpretation
            of the basic features of the data, they are too stylized to
            confront the micro-level data in a more formal quantitative
            analysis. In this paper, the author develops a model in
            which establishments grow by innovating new products. By
            introducing heterogeneity to a stylized industry evolution
            model, the analysis succeeds in explaining several features
            of the data, such as the thick right tail of the size
            distribution and the relations between age, size, and the
            hazard rate of exit, which had eluded existing models. In
            the model, heterogeneity in producer behavior arises through
            a combination of exogenous efficiency differences and
            accumulated innovations resulting from past endogenous
            research and development investments. Integrating these
            forces allows the model to perform well quantitatively in
            fitting data on Chilean manufacturers. The counterfactual
            experiments show how producers respond to research and
            development subsidies and more competitive market environments.
Labor skills and foreign investment
            in a dynamic economy : estimating the knowledge-capital
            model for Singapore
Singapore is an interesting example of
            how the pattern of foreign investment changes with economic
            development. The authors analyze inbound and outbound
            investment between Singapore and a sample of industrialized
            and developing countries over the period 1984-2003.  They
            find that Singapores two-way investment with industrialized
            nations has shifted into skill-seeking activities over the
            period, while Singapores investments in developing
            countries have increased sharply and become concentrated in
            labor-seeking activities. Singapores increasing skill
            abundance relative to all countries in the sample accounted
            for 41 percent of average inbound stocks during the period,
            that is, US$18 billion annually; the corresponding figure
            for outbound stocks was 40 percent, that is, US$5.51 billion annually.
Aid, natural disasters and the
            samaritan's dilemma
This paper discusses the impact of
            foreign aid on the recipient country's preparedness
            against natural disasters. The theoretical model shows that
            foreign aid can have two opposing effects on a
            country's level of mitigating activities. In order to
            test the theoretical propositions, the authors analyze the
            effect of foreign aid dependence on ex-ante risk-management
            activity proxied by the death toll from major storms, floods
            and earthquakes occurring worldwide between 1980 and 2002.
            They find evidence that the crowding-out effect of foreign
            aid outweighs the preventive effect in the case of storms,
            while there is mixed evidence in the case of floods and earthquakes.
On the channel and type of
            international disaster aid
Research suggests that a donor countrys
            decision to provide post-disaster assistance is not only
            driven by the severity of a disaster and the resulting
            humanitarian needs in the recipient country, but also by
            strategic considerations. The authors argue that the
            identification of the determinants of the size of disaster
            assistance is a first step in the analysis of the donors
            behavior. Since all aid is not motivated by the same
            reasons, the evaluation of the donor countrys behavior
            requires a second step accounting for the type and the
            channel of aid provided. Using data on international
            disaster assistance between 2000 and 2007, the analysis
            examines both the donor countries' decision on the
            channel (bilateral versus multilateral) and the type of
            disaster relief (cash versus in-kind). The empirical results
            suggest that international disaster relief is not as much
            driven by the needs of the recipient country, but also by
            strategic interests (for example, oil or trade
            relationships) of the donor country. Bilateral and cash
            transfers are used as a vehicle to signal strategic
            interests, while multilateral and in-kind transfers are
            chosen to control for misuse in badly governed recipient countries.
Addressing educational disparity :
            using district level education development indices for
            equitable resource allocations in India
The challenge of development work in the
            social sector in India today is one of bridging huge
            disparities across regions of the country, gender and social
            groups. Unless national and state policies specifically
            target resources to address these disparities, achieving
            higher level outcomes in an inclusive manner, which is the
            real goal for human development in education and health,
            will be a distant dream. This paper takes up the case of the
            Indian governments Elementary Education for All Mission to
            understand how this flagship program relates investments to
            spatial and social disparities. For identifying the most
            deprived districts in terms of educational inputs, outputs
            and overall development, the authors estimate district level
            education development indices for 2003-2004. The
            contribution of the largest investment program is measured
            by "per child allocations" and expenditures at the
            state and district levels for 2005-2006.  An analysis of
            comparing the ratio of allocations to expenditures with the
            ratio of district level indices to sub-dimensional indices
            shows that there is an apparent disconnect between the
            "real investment needs" of the districts,
            reflected in their level of educational development and the
            actual allocations made on an annual basis. The analysis
            shows that although all districts received more funds for
            investing in elementary education programs, the most
            disadvantaged and needy districts received proportionately
            more funds, which helped these districts to bridge access
            and infrastructure gaps and appoint more teachers.
            Benchmarking sector development by spatial entities helps
            not only in monitoring the outcomes, but also in targeting
            planning and funding to reduce disparities.
What explains the low survival rate
            of developing country export flows
Successful export growth and
            diversification require not only entry into new export
            products and markets, but also the survival and growth of
            export flows. This paper uses a detailed, cross-country
            dataset of product level bilateral export flows to
            illustrate that exporting is an extremely perilous activity
            and especially so in low-income countries. The authors find
            that unobserved individual heterogeneity in product-level
            export flow data prevails despite controlling for a wide
            range of observed country and product characteristics. This
            questions previous studies that have used the Cox
            proportional hazards model to model export survival. The
            authors estimate a Prentice-Gloeckler model, amended with a
            gamma mixture distribution summarizing unobserved individual
            heterogeneity. The empirical results confirm the
            significance of a range of products as well as
            country-specific factors in determining the survival of
            export flows. From a policy perspective, an interesting
            finding is the importance of learning-by-doing for export
            survival: experience with exporting the same product to
            other markets or different products to the same market are
            found to strongly increase the chance of export survival. A
            better understanding of such learning effects could
            substantially improve the effectiveness of export promotion strategies.
The impacts of international
            migration on remaining household members : omnibus results
            from a migration lottery program
The impacts of international migration
            on development in the sending countries, and especially the
            effects on remaining household members, are increasingly
            studied. However, comparisons of households in developing
            countries with and without migrants are complicated by a
            double-selectivity problem: households self-select into
            migration, and among households involved in migration, some
            send a subset of members with the rest remaining while other
            households migrate en masse. The authors address these
            selectivity issues using the randomization provided by an
            immigration ballot under the Pacific Access Category of New
            Zealands immigration policy. They survey applicants to the
            2002-05 ballots in Tonga and compare outcomes for the
            remaining household members of emigrants with those for
            members of similar households that were unsuccessful in the
            ballots. The immigration laws determine which household
            members can accompany the principal migrant, providing an
            instrument to address the second selectivity issue. Using
            this natural experiment, the authors examine the myriad
            impacts that migration has on remaining household members,
            focussing on labor supply, income, durable assets, financial
            service usage, diet, and physical and mental health. The
            analysis uses multiple hypothesis testing procedures to
            examine which impacts are robust. The findings indicate that
            the overall impact on households left behind is largely
            negative. The findings also reveal evidence that both
            sources of selectivity matter, leading studies that fail to
            adequately address them to misrepresent the impact of migration.
Substitution and technological
            change under carbon cap and trade : lessons from Europe
The use of carbon-intense fuels by the
            power sector contributes significantly to the greenhouse gas
            emissions of most countries. For this reason, the sector is
            often key to initial efforts to regulate emissions. But how
            long does it take before new regulatory incentives result in
            a switch to less carbon intense fuels? This study examines
            fuel switching in electricity production following the
            introduction of the European Unions Emissions Trading
            System, a cap-and-trade regulatory framework for greenhouse
            gas emissions. The empirical analysis examines the demand
            for carbon permits, carbon based fuels, and carbon-free
            energy for 12 European countries using monthly data on fuel
            use, prices, and electricity generation. A short-run
            restricted cost function is estimated in which carbon
            permits, high-carbon fuels, and low-carbon fuels are
            variable inputs, conditional on quasi-fixed carbon-free
            energy production from nuclear, hydro, and renewable energy
            capacity. The results indicate that prices for permits and
            fuels affect the composition of inputs in a statistically
            significant way. Even so, the analysis suggests that the
            industrys fuel-switching capabilities are limited in the
            short run as is the scope for introducing new technologies.
            This is because of the dominant role that past irreversible
            investments play in determining power-generating capacity.
            Moreover, the results suggest that, because the capacity for
            fuel substitution is limited, the impact of carbon emission
            limits on electricity prices can be significant if fuel
            prices increase together with carbon permit prices. The
            estimates suggest that for every 10 percent rise in carbon
            and fuel prices, the marginal cost of electric power
            generation increases by 8 percent in the short run. The
            European experience points to the importance of starting
            early down a low-carbon path and of policies that introduce
            flexibility in how emission reductions are achieved.
Scaling up aid or scaling down : the
            global economic crisis and Rwanda's MDGs
Rwanda is not on track to achieve most
            of the Millennium Development Goals at a time when hopes for
            scaled-up aid are mixed with concerns that, in the context
            of the global economic crisis, aid instead will be scaled
            down. This paper analyzes the effects of alternative
            scenarios for grant aid, government spending allocations
            (between infrastructure, agriculture, and human
            development), and government efficiency. The authors use an
            economy-wide model for development strategy analysis,
            Maquette for Millennium Development Goal Simulations. Under
            a plausible scenario for increased aid, annual growth in
            gross domestic product increases by as much as 0.6
            percentage points relative to a baseline with a growth rate
            of 6 percent; by 2020, the headcount poverty rate declines
            to 32 percent, 3 percentage points lower than for the
            baseline. A plausible scenario for reduced aid leads to a
            symmetric growth reduction but a more pronounced increase in
            poverty, at 40 percent in 2020. When aid increases, the most
            positive growth and poverty reduction impacts occur if
            spending increases are allocated to infrastructure and
            agriculture; progress in human health and education is
            significant but weaker than if additional spending is
            focused on these areas. Given synergies and diminishing
            marginal returns from expansion in a limited area, the
            scenarios that may appear most attractive and politically
            feasible have a broad and balanced expansion across
            government functions, promoting both growth and human development.
The impact of climate change on
            catastrophe risk models : implications for catastrophe risk
            markets in developing countries
Catastrophe risk models allow insurers,
            reinsurers and governments to assess the risk of loss from
            catastrophic events, such as hurricanes. These models rely
            on computer technology and the latest earth and
            meteorological science information to generate thousands if
            not millions of simulated events. Recently observed
            hurricane activity, particularly in the 2004 and 2005
            hurricane seasons, in conjunction with recently published
            scientific literature has led risk modelers to revisit their
            hurricane models and develop climate conditioned hurricane
            models. This paper discusses these climate conditioned
            hurricane models and compares their risk estimates to those
            of base normal hurricane models. This comparison shows that
            the recent 50 year period of climate change has potentially
            increased North Atlantic hurricane frequency by 30 percent.
            However, such an increase in hurricane frequency would
            result in an increase in risk to human property that is
            equivalent to less than 10 years worth of US coastal
            property growth. Increases in potential extreme losses
            require the reinsurance industry to secure additional risk
            capital for these peak risks, resulting in the short term in
            lower risk capacity for developing countries. However,
            reinsurers and investors in catastrophe securities may still
            have a long-term interest in providing catastrophe coverage
            in middle and low-income countries as this allows reinsurers
            and investors to better diversify their catastrophe risk portfolios.
The ASEAN free trade agreement :
            impact on trade flows and external trade barriers
Using detailed data on trade and tariffs
            from 1992-2007, the authors examine how the ASEAN Free Trade
            Agreement has affected trade with nonmembers and external
            tariffs facing nonmembers. First, the paper examines the
            effect of preferential and external tariff reduction on
            import growth from ASEAN insiders and outsiders across HS
            6-digit industries. The analysis finds no evidence that
            preferential liberalization has led to lower import growth
            from nonmembers. Second, it examines the relationship
            between preferential tariff reduction and MFN tariff
            reduction. The analysis finds that preferential
            liberalization tends to precede external tariff
            liberalization. To examine whether this tariff
            complementarity is a result of simultaneous decision making,
            the authors use the scheduled future preferential tariff
            reductions (agreed to in 1992) as instruments for actual
            preferential tariff changes after the Asia crisis. The
            results remain unchanged, suggesting that there is a causal
            relationship between preferential and MFN tariff reduction.
            The findings also indicate that external liberalization was
            relatively sharper in the products where preferences are
            likely to be most damaging, proving further support for a
            causal effect. Overall, the results imply that the ASEAN
            agreement has been a force for broader liberalization.
Financial institutions and markets
            across countries and over time - data and analysis
This paper introduces the updated and
            expanded version of the Financial Development and Structure
            Database and presents recent trends in structure and
            development of financial institutions and markets across
            countries. The authors add indicators on banking structure
            and financial globalization. They find a deepening of both
            financial markets and institutions, a trend concentrated in
            high-income countries and more pronounced for markets than
            for banks. Similarly, the recent increase in cross-border
            lending and debt issues has been concentrated in high-income
            countries, while low and lower-middle income countries have
            experienced an increase in remittance flows.  Low net
            interest margins, rising profitability and declining
            stability in high-income countries banking sectors
            characterize the recent financial sector boom in high income
            countries leading up to the global financial crisis of 2007.
Stigma and the take-up of social programs
Empirical studies send mixed messages as
            to the magnitude of social stigma associated with the
            take-up of social transfers and the impact of stigma on
            take-up. These mixed signals may be related to the fact that
            stigma and program participation are likely to be jointly
            determined. If there is a high (low) degree of participation
            in a program, stigma is likely to be lower (higher) due at
            least in part to that high (low) degree of participation.
            This is because the more eligible persons participate, the
            less one can single out specific individuals for stigma
            because they use the program. This note suggests this
            theoretically with a simple model showing that we may have
            in an idealized setting two equilibria: one with stigma and
            zero participation in a social program, and one with perfect
            participation and no stigma.