rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Children on the Move : Progressive
            Redistribution of Humanitarian Cash Transfers among Refugees
Policy Research Working Paper 9471

# Children on the Move

Progressive Redistribution of Humanitarian Cash Transfers among Refugees _Berk Özler Çiğdem Çelik Scott Cunningham P. Facundo Cuevas Luca Parisotto_ Development Economics Development Research Group & Poverty and Equity Global Practice November 2020
Economic Crises and Returns to
            University Education in Middle-Income Countries : Stylized
            Facts and COVID-19 Projections
This paper documents stylized facts on
            rates of returns to education during economic crises. It
            shows from three middle-income countries -- Indonesia,
            Pakistan, and South Africa -- that the rate of return to
            university education (versus secondary education) has
            increased during economic crises. Based on this stylized
            fact, the paper projects that the returns for university
            graduates may increase by at least one-quarter to one-third
            during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Technology Within and Across Firms
This study collects data on the
            sophistication of technologies used at the business function
            level for a representative sample of firms in Vietnam,
            Senegal, and the Brazilian state of Ceara. The analysis
            finds a large variance in technology sophistication across
            the business functions of a firm. The within-firm variance
            in technology sophistication is greater than the variance in
            sophistication across firms, which in turn is greater than
            the variance in sophistication across regions or countries.
            The paper documents a stable cross-firm relationship between
            technology at the business function and firm levels, which
            it calls the technology curve. Significant heterogeneity is
            uncovered in the slopes of the technology curves across
            business functions, a finding that is consistent with
            non-homotheticities in firm-level technology aggregators.
            Firm productivity is positively associated with the
            within-firm variance and the average level of technology
            sophistication. Development accounting exercises show that
            cross-firm variation in technology accounts for one-third of
            cross-firm differences in productivity and one-fifth of the
            agricultural versus non-agricultural gap in cross-country
            differences in firm productivity.
The Employment Effect of Place-Based
            Policies : Evidence from India
Many governments in developing countries
            have pursued policies targeting specific geographic areas
            over the past several decades. However, only a few have
            rigorously evaluated the causal impact of these
            interventions. This paper examines the effectiveness of a
            prominent place-based policy in India: the centrally
            sponsored New Industrial Policy for the state of
            Uttarakhand. Using georeferenced economic census data, the
            analysis applies a boundary discontinuity research design
            and zones in on the unique border between Uttarakhand and
            Uttar Pradesh, two states that were officially one before
            the implementation of the New Industrial Policy. The
            findings show that there was a significant and abrupt
            increase in employment at the town and village level when
            crossing the state border from Uttar Pradesh to Uttarakhand
            after the full implementation of the New Industrial Policy.
            The conclusion even holds for firms within the same sector.
            The increase is mainly due to larger firm sizes and
            expansions into new industries. A main component of the New
            Industrial Policy was excise tax incentives for certain
            industries. The paper finds that the increase in
            cross-border employment is higher for sectors receiving
            excise tax incentives than others. Additionally, exploring
            spillovers between industries, the paper shows that,
            controlling for the direct effects, the sectors with labor
            requirements similar to those receiving excise tax
            incentives also experience an increase in employment.
            Finally, the growth in the number of firms in Uttar Pradesh
            close to the border remained stable before and after the New
            Industrial Policy, which suggests the results are not fully
            driven by firms relocating from Uttar Pradesh to Uttarakhand.
Ex-Ante Evaluation of Sub-National
            Labor Market Impacts of Trade Reforms
A macro-micro simulation framework that
            links a computable general equilibrium model with the
            survey-based global income distribution dynamics model can
            be used to assess the economic and distributional effects of
            macroeconomic shocks and policies. The methodology is used
            to assess the economic and subnational labor market impacts
            of a series of stylized trade policy options for the Sri
            Lankan economy over a 10-year time period. The analysis
            focuses on the impact of unilateral para-tariff
            liberalization, free-trade agreements with China or India,
            and a full-reform scenario. The simulation results show that
            more ambitious trade reform can result in larger gains in
            gross domestic product, poverty reduction, and exports,
            particularly in sectors employing a higher proportion of
            women. In the absence of additional policies, growth is not
            equally distributed. In all the scenarios in which the Sri
            Lankan economy grows, the distribution of gains is
            regressive. Increasing labor demand for skilled workers
            translates into a larger skilled wage premium -- by as much
            as 1.1 percent with respect to the baseline. Implementation
            of full trade reform accelerates the concentration of
            economic activity in the western regions of Colombo,
            Gampaha, and Kalutara. Net employment gains in the western
            regions would increase from 111,000 to 136,000 in the full
            reform scenario by 2028 and with respect to baseline conditions.
Does Maternal Depression Undermine
            Childhood Cognitive Development Evidence from the Young
            Lives Survey in Peru
This paper studies the effect of
            maternal depression on early childhood cognition in Peru.
            The identification strategy exploits variation in exposure
            to exogenous shocks during early life to instrument for
            maternal depression. The results suggest that maternal
            depression is detrimental to the child's vocabulary at
            age five. Although the effects fade out by age eight, early
            vocabulary gaps can undermine other development outcomes.
            The effects do not vary by maternal education, but they are
            significant only for children living in disadvantaged
            households. The presence of a partner worsens the effect of
            maternal depression on vocabulary development, and this
            effect is driven by households with partners who drink heavily.
Opening-up Trajectories and Economic
            Recovery : Lessons after the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic
This paper analyzes the reopening
            process of countries in Europe and Central Asia after the
            first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides evidence on
            the effects of different reopening trajectories and their
            timing and speed on economic recovery. The analysis
            indicates that countries that adopted a gradual, staged
            reopening experienced stronger economic recovery compared
            with the countries that rushed into lifting the restrictive
            measures before the pandemic was under control. Postponing
            lifting the restrictions until after the pandemic's
            peak was reached has a positive impact on economic activity.
            Governance also matters: a higher level of trust in
            government is associated with increased economic activity
            among countries that carried out a gradual reopening
            process. There is also suggestive evidence that providing
            people objective data on the progress of the pandemic may
            speed up the recovery process.
Scarred but Wiser : World War
            2's COVID Legacy
The paper formalizes and tests the
            hypothesis that greater exposure to big shocks induces
            stronger societal responses for adaptation and protection
            from future big shocks. Support for this hypothesis is found
            in various strands of the literature and in new empirical
            tests using cross-country data on deaths due to COVID-19 and
            deaths during World War 2. Countries with higher death rates
            in the war saw lower death rates during the COVID-19
            pandemic. The tests are robust to a wide range of model
            specifications and alternative assumptions.
Does Patient Demand Contribute to
            the Overuse of Prescription Drugs ?
This study conducted an experiment in
            Mali to test whether patients pressure doctors to prescribe
            medical treatment they do not necessarily need. The
            experiment varied patients&#x2019; information about a
            discount for antimalarial tablets and measured demand for
            both tablets and costlier antimalarial injections. The study
            finds evidence of patient-driven demand: informing patients
            about the discount, instead of letting doctors decide to
            share this information, increased discount use by 35 percent
            and overall malaria treatment by 10 percent. These marginal
            patients rarely had malaria, worsening the illness-treatment
            match. Providers did not use the information advantage to
            sell injections -- their use fell in both information conditions.
Productivity Loss and Misallocation
            of Resources in Southeast Asia
This paper examines within-sector
            resource misallocation in three Southeast Asian countries --
            Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The methodology accounts
            for measurement error in revenues and costs. The firm-level
            evidence suggests that measurement error is substantial,
            resulting in an overestimation of misallocation by as much
            as 30 percent. Nevertheless, resource misallocation across
            firms within a sector remains large, albeit declining. The
            findings imply that there are considerable potential gains
            from efficient reallocation -- above 80 percent for
            Indonesia and around 20 to 30 percent for Malaysia and
            Vietnam. Private domestic firms and firms with higher
            productivity appear to face larger distortions that prevent
            them from expanding.
The Determinants of Regional Foreign
            Direct Investment and Its Spatial Dependence : Evidence from Tunisia
This paper explores the relationship
            between key economic and institutional attributes of
            Tunisian governorates and their ability to attract foreign
            direct investment inflows. A dynamic generalized method of
            moments and spatial autoregressive approaches are used to
            estimate a model of regional foreign direct investment over
            the recent period. The results provide evidence of regional
            interdependence of foreign direct investment that appears to
            be highly clustered along the coastal areas. An
            increase/decrease of foreign direct investment inflows to a
            given region creates an incentive/disincentive for other
            foreign direct investment inflows to the same regions as
            well as nearby ones. These agglomeration forces are
            relatively strong in Tunisia in the presence of vertical
            foreign direct investment. Further, the results indicate
            that a relatively developed market size, an increase of
            regional development areas, as well as robust governance
            practices and infrastructure are positive determinants of
            regional foreign direct investment inflows. Finally, the
            paper shows that although some of the determinants exhibit
            spillover effects on nearby regions, the direct effect on
            the region represents the bulk of the influence over foreign
            direct investment inflows.
Lights Out COVID-19 Containment
            Policies and Economic Activity
This paper estimates the impact of a
            differential relaxation of COVID-19 containment policies on
            aggregate economic activity in India. Following a uniform
            national lockdown, the Government of India classified all
            districts into three zones with varying containment measures
            in May 2020. Using a difference-in-differences approach, the
            paper estimates the impact of these restrictions on
            nighttime light intensity, a standard high-frequency proxy
            for economic activity. To conduct this analysis,
            pandemic-era, district-level data from a range of novel
            sources are combined -- monthly nighttime lights from global
            satellites; Facebook’s mobility data from individual
            smartphone locations; and high-frequency, household-level
            survey data on income and consumption, supplemented with
            data from the Indian Census and the Reserve Bank of India.
            The analysis finds that nighttime light intensity in May was
            12.4 percent lower for districts with the most severe
            restrictions and 1.7 percent lower for districts with
            intermediate restrictions, compared with districts with the
            least restrictions. The differences were largest in May,
            when the different policies were in place, and slowly
            tapered in June and July. Restricted mobility and lower
            household income are plausible channels for these results.
            Stricter containment measures had larger impacts in
            districts with greater population density of older
            residents, as well as more services employment and bank credit.
Corporate Market Power in Romania :
            Assessing Recent Trends, Drivers, and Implications for Competition
This paper explores firm-level
            heterogeneity to identify the underlying drivers of market
            power trends in Romania and the implications for competition
            and economic growth. The results show that the
            (sales-weighted) average markup in Romania increased by
            around 15 percent between 2008 and 2017. A key driving force
            behind this aggregate trend was the ability of a small
            fraction of firms—the top decile firms in the markup
            distribution—to increase their markups. These firms do not
            seem to follow the typical superstar firms’ profile: they
            are smaller, less efficient, and less likely to invest in
            intangible assets than other firms in the markup
            distribution and overrepresented in less knowledge-intensive
            service sectors (for example, the retail and trade sector).
            This suggests that the increase in markups in Romania might
            be associated with an environment that is less conducive to
            competition. A decomposition exercise shows that the
            increase in aggregate markups has been driven mostly by
            incumbents rather than new entrants and exiting firms, which
            could be interpreted as a sign of consolidation of market
            power among existing firms. The paper also finds that
            certain firm characteristics matter to explain differences
            in markup performance: size, age, research and development
            profile, export propensity, location, and especially
            ownership. Further, the paper shows that additional
            productivity dividends are associated with increased
            competition in Romania. Overall, these findings illustrate
            potential policy angles that need to be tackled to enhance
            market contestability and boost productivity growth, such as
            addressing regulations that restrict entry and rivalry in
            the retail trade sector, which concentrates a substantial
            proportion of high-markup firms, as well as promoting
            competitive neutrality across markets where public and
            private actors compete.
Applying Machine Learning and
            Geolocation Techniques to Social Media Data (Twitter) to
            Develop a Resource for Urban Planning
With all the recent attention focused on
            big data, it is easy to overlook that basic vital statistics
            remain difficult to obtain in most of the world. This
            project set out to test whether an openly available dataset
            (Twitter) could be transformed into a resource for urban
            planning and development. The hypothesis is tested by
            creating road traffic crash location data, which are scarce
            in most resource-poor environments but essential for
            addressing the number one cause of mortality for children
            over age five and young adults. The research project scraped
            874,588 traffic-related tweets in Nairobi, Kenya, applied a
            machine learning model to capture the occurrence of a crash,
            and developed an improved geoparsing algorithm to identify
            its location. The project geolocated 32,991 crash reports in
            Twitter for 2012-20 and clustered them into 22,872 unique
            crashes to produce one of the first crash maps for Nairobi.
            A motorcycle delivery service was dispatched in real-time to
            verify a subset of crashes, showing 92 percent accuracy.
            Using a spatial clustering algorithm, portions of the road
            network (less than 1 percent) were identified where 50
            percent of the geolocated crashes occurred. Even with
            limitations in the representativeness of the data, the
            results can provide urban planners useful information to
            target road safety improvements where resources are limited.
Do Coronavirus Containment Measures
            Work Worldwide Evidence
Using a daily data base covering 158
            countries during January to August 2020, this paper assesses
            the effectiveness of coronavirus containment measures in
            reducing contagion and death rates. To estimate the
            effectiveness of different containment measures, the paper
            uses a methodological approach that takes into consideration
            the persistence in the dynamics between coronavirus
            containment measures and contagion/death rates, countries’
            idiosyncratic characteristics, and the endogeneity of the
            containment measures. To obtain efficient estimates of the
            effect of coronavirus containment measures on contagion and
            death rates, a dynamic panel-data technique is used,
            complemented by efficient instruments for the decision of
            adopting coronavirus containment measures. The results show
            that countries with better health systems, higher
            temperatures, and more democratic regimes tended to delay
            the adoption of coronavirus containment measures. The
            results also detect demonstration effects as the early
            adoption of coronavirus containment measures in Western
            Europe led other countries to accelerate their adoption.
            Using predictions from the estimated model, it is possible
            to benchmark the timing of adoption of coronavirus
            containment measures and assess whether their adoption was
            timely or not and if they were lifted prematurely or not.
            The findings of this exercise show that countries with
            timely adopted coronavirus containment measures restricted
            activities, meanwhile they lagged in the adoption of
            measures restricting individual liberties. The evidence
            indicates that most countries resisted the urge to lift
            restrictions in advance, once they have been in place: over
            60 percent of the countries have reacted as predicted by our
            econometric models, maintaining coronavirus containment
            measures in place until contagion rates receded.
            Nevertheless, around one-quarter of the countries lifted
            their restrictions one month or more ahead of what the
            worldwide evidence would have suggested, in particular by
            removing lockdowns and re-opening workplaces. Finally, the
            results show that coronavirus containment measures have been
            effective in reducing contagion and death rates, but there
            are differences in the effectiveness among them, and
            restrictions on activities have been more effective than
            restrictions on personal liberties.
Measuring Total Factor Productivity
            Using the Enterprise Surveys : A Methodological Note
Total factor productivity is a key
            element of economic growth and an important performance
            metric for policy makers. This note describes the
            methodology for measuring firm-level total factor
            productivity using the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys
            cross-country data. It also presents some estimates
            recovered from the production function. Two versions of the
            production function are estimated: one Cobb-Douglas, the
            other a more flexible translog specification. Both
            estimations are at the two-digit industry level pooling all
            the Enterprise Surveys data across economies. Evidence is
            found against using a Cobb-Douglas specification, which is
            more parsimonious, and in favor of using the flexible
            translog specification. The resulting firm-level estimates
            are all published in the Enterprise Surveys database with a
            unique firm identifier to link to the rest of the Enterprise
            Surveys data; because the estimates are reliant on new data,
            they are updated periodically as new Enterprise Surveys data
            become available. The results show that: (i) median firms
            operate close to constant returns to scale; (ii)
            gross-output and value-added production functions provide
            similar ranking of sectors in terms of output elasticities,
            capital intensity, and returns to scale; (iii) there is
            large, firm-level heterogeneity in output elasticities; and
            (iv) gross-output-based total factor productivity measures
            are less dispersed than the value-added ones.