rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Efficiency, legitimacy and impacts
            of targeting methods : evidence from an experiment in Niger
The methods to select safety net
            beneficiaries are the subject of frequent policy debates.
            This paper presents the results from a randomized experiment
            analyzing how efficiency, legitimacy, and short-term program
            effectiveness vary across widely used targeting methods. The
            experiment was embedded in the roll-out of a national cash
            transfer program in Niger. Eligible villages were randomly
            assigned to have beneficiary households selected through
            community-based targeting, a proxy-means test, or a formula
            designed to identify the food-insecure. Proxy-means testing
            is found to outperform other methods in identifying
            households with lower consumption per capita. The methods
            perform similarly against other welfare benchmarks.
            Legitimacy is high across all methods, but local populations
            have a slight preference for formula-based approaches.
            Manipulation and information imperfections are found to
            affect community-based targeting, although triangulation
            across multiple selection committees mitigates the related
            risks. Finally, short-term program impacts on food security
            are largest among households selected by proxy-means
            testing. Overall, the differences in performance across
            targeting methods are small relative to the overall level of
            exclusion stemming from limited funding for social programs.
Estimating intergenerational
            mobility with incomplete data : coresidency and truncation
            bias in rank-based relative and absolute mobility measures
The rank-based measures of
            intergenerational mobility have become increasingly popular
            in economics literature. Recent evidence shows that
            rank-based measures are less affected by measurement error
            and life-cycle bias compared with other standard measures
            such as intergenerational regression coefficient and
            intergenerational correlation. However, most of the
            available household surveys suffer from sample truncation,
            because coresidency is used to define household membership.
            There is no evidence on how sample truncation affects the
            rank-based mobility estimates relative to intergenerational
            regression coefficient and intergenerational correlation.
            This paper provides evidence on this in the context of
            intergenerational schooling persistence, using two
            exceptional surveys from India and Bangladesh that include
            all children irrespective of residency status. The analysis
            shows that the measures of relative mobility (slopes) are
            biased downward in coresident samples, but the average bias
            in rank correlation is less than half of that in
            intergenerational regression coefficient, and comparable to
            that in intergenerational correlation in magnitude. The
            intercept estimates are biased upward, with the largest bias
            found in the intercept of the regression used for
            intergenerational correlation. Truncation bias in rank-based
            absolute mobility estimates is the lowest in most cases. The
            results strengthen the case for rank-based measures of
            intergenerational mobility when working with the standard
            household surveys.
Estimating intergenerational
            mobility with incomplete data : coresidency and truncation
            bias in rank-based relative and absolute mobility measures
WPS8414 Policy Research Working Paper 8414 Estimating Intergenerational Mobility with Incomplete Data Coresidency and Truncation Bias in Rank-Based Relative and Absolute Mobility Measures _M. Shahe Emran Forhad Shilpi_ Development Research Group April 2018
Jobs ! electricity shortages and
            unemployment in Africa
To what extent does unreliable
            electricity provision pervasive in many African countries
            affect job creation in the region? This paper addresses the
            question by assembling household and firm level data from 29
            African countries along with unique project level data on
            foreign direct investment (FDI). Leveraging several
            quasi-experimental approaches, the paper shows that outages
            have a non-trivial negative impact on employment. The effect
            is driven by a reduction in employment in non-agricultural
            sectors and skilled jobs. Unskilled jobs are unaffected by
            electricity outages. The negative effect of outages on  firm
            entry and the performance of incumbent firms are plausible channels.
Impact of free trade agreement use
            on import prices
This paper examines the impact of free
            trade agreement (FTA) use on import prices. For this
            analysis, it employs establishment-level import data with
            information on tariff schemes, that is, the FTA and
            most-favored-nation schemes used for importing. Unlike
            previous studies, this paper estimates the effects of FTA
            use on prices by controlling for differences in
            importing-firm characteristics. There are three main
            findings. First, the effect of FTA use is overestimated when
            not controlling for importing firm-related fixed effects.
            Second, on average, firms' FTA use reduces tariffs by
            12 percentage points and raises import prices by 3.6-6.7
            percent. Third, in general, a price rise resulting from the
            costs of complying with rules of origin was not found.
Capital flow measures : structural
            or cyclical policy tools
This paper analyzes the use of capital
            flow measures in emerging markets. Drawing on a specially
            compiled new database of capital flow measures, it
            establishes that policy makers in emerging market economies
            do not use capital flow measures as an active tool at
            business cycle frequency. While there is a general trend
            toward the liberalization of capital accounts, the use of
            capital flow measures as a countercyclical policy tool is
            rather sporadic. Instead, countries show a distinct
            preference for using monetary policy, exchange rate
            adjustments, macro prudential measures, and adjustments in
            external reserves to modulate the impacts of domestic
            business cycles, international liquidity cycles, and shocks
            to capital flows. Regulation of different kinds of capital
            flows -- resident and nonresident flows; inflows and
            outflows; and foreign direct investment, portfolio, and
            banking sector flows -- is changed infrequently and is
            acyclical to domestic business and external liquidity cycles.
Designing pension systems with
            coherent funded private pillars including issues for
            notional defined contribution schemes
This paper reviews the factors that
            should guide the design of private funded pensions to create
            a complete pension system alongside a notional defined
            contribution -- or public -- component. It argues that a mix
            of public and private pensions is the most effective option
            to deliver the best combination of pension outcomes. Pension
            design should start with a vision for five core outcomes:
            coverage, adequacy, sustainability, efficiency, and
            security. Thinking through these outcomes helps guide
            choices for market structure, benefit type, contributions,
            investment strategy, and other factors. As well as technical
            design, the governance, scale, and expertise of pension
            funds are critical for good investment and other outcomes.
            Regulators and supervisors should also focus on these
            outcomes and then work out how best to mitigate the risks to
            achieving them over time. These issues are relevant in
            relation to any public pillar, but notional defined
            contribution (NDC) systems bring clarity and transparency to
            policy makers in the benefit formula. The NDC payout formula
            can offer insights for how to improve the payout options in
            funded pillars. The clarity on the NDC formula also means
            that the joint distribution of public and private pensions
            can be modeled.  This is important because the precise NDC
            formula may have implications for optimal investment
            strategies for private pensions, given, for example, the
            negative correlation between real per capita GDP growth and
            equity market returns over long periods.
School costs, short-run
            participation, and long-run outcomes : evidence from Kenya
Access to school has risen dramatically
            in recent decades, with large gains from reducing costs. Few
            studies report long-term impacts, however. This paper
            reports the impact of an educational intervention that
            reduced out-of-pocket schooling costs for children in poor
            communities in Kenya by providing school uniforms. The
            program used a lottery to determine who would receive a
            school uniform. Receiving a uniform reduced school
            absenteeism by 37 percent for the average student (7
            percentage points) and by 55 percent for children who
            initially had no uniform (15 percentage points). Eight years
            after the program began, there is no evidence of sustained
            impact of the program on highest grade completed or primary
            school completion rates. A bounding exercise suggests no
            substantive positive, long-term impacts. These results
            contribute to a small literature that demonstrates the risk
            of fade-out of initial impacts of education investments.
The use of financial incentives to
            prevent undesirable behaviors
Behaviors that are putting people's
            health and well-being at risk are widespread in the
            developing world and some of them, like smoking and
            unhealthy diets, are on the rise. Some of these behaviors
            can be prohibited or prevented by taxation. But financial
            incentives such as conditional cash transfers are also
            increasingly proposed and tested to discourage such
            behaviors, in domains as varied as HIV/AIDS, drugs, alcohol,
            smoking, obesity, or early marriage prevention. This paper
            presents the theoretical justification for using such
            incentives, distinguishing between the price, income
            effects, and the nudge effects. The growing literature about
            the effectiveness of financial incentives to prevent
            undesirable behaviors is reviewed in detail for each type of
            harmful behavior. Finally, the paper discusses the long-term
            sustainability of such incentives, a key issue if they are
            to be scaled up beyond pilot programs and research projects.
            The current evidence on whether such incentives have an
            impact after they are discontinued is mixed. Some design
            features, like lotteries or commitment devices, could induce
            savings as well as increase effectiveness, therefore
            improving sustainability.
A randomized evaluation of a
            low-cost and highly scripted teaching method to improve
            basic early grade reading skills in Papua New Guinea
Early grade literacy skills are crucial
            for children's future education and ultimately their
            contribution to human capital formation and economic
            development. A significant challenge in development is
            identifying low-cost interventions to improve early literacy
            skills in contexts characterized by varying teacher ability
            and severe budget constraints. This paper evaluates the
            impact of Papua New Guinea's randomized Reading Booster
            Programme, which was conducted in Madang and Western
            Highlands Province in 2013 and 2014, respectively. The
            program provided teachers with training on a highly
            structured teaching method that they could apply one hour
            per day within the teaching time allocated to reading. Using
            the randomized assignment of schools into the program, the
            paper shows that it had a substantial impact on the reading
            skills targeted by the program for third grade students,
            ranging from 0.6 to 0.7 standard deviation. Large effects on
            other reading skills were found for girls but not boys. The
            program's cost per student was approximately US$60.
Political connections and firms :
            network dimensions
Business and politicians'
            interaction is pervasive but has mostly been analyzed with a
            binary approach, i.e. either a firm is connected to a
            politician or not. Yet the network dimensions of such
            connections are ubiquitous. This paper uses use a unique
            data set for seven economies that documents politically
            exposed persons and their links to companies, political
            parties, and other individuals. The data set is used to
            identify networks of connections, including their scale and
            composition. The analysis finds that all country networks
            are integrated having a Big Island. They also tend to be
            marked by small-world properties of high clustering and
            short path length. Matching the data to firm-level
            information, the paper examines the association between
            being connected and firm-level attributes. The originality
            of the analysis is to identify how location in a network,
            including the extent of ties and centrality, is correlated
            with firm scale and performance. In a binary approach, such
            network characteristics are omitted and the scale and
            economic impact of politically connected business may be
            significantly mis/under-estimated. By comparing the results
            of the binary approach with the network approach, the paper
            also assesses the biases that result from ignoring network attributes.
Household expenditure and poverty
            measures in 60 minutes : a new approach with results from Mogadishu
In fragile states and areas beset by
            insecurity and conflict, the time available for a
            face-to-face interview is typically limited. That prevents
            administering the lengthy household consumption expenditure
            surveys used for measuring poverty. This paper presents a
            new approach to obtain unbiased estimates of poverty when
            the time to conduct interviews is a binding constraint. The
            finite list of consumption recall items is partitioned
            selectively into a core module and algorithmically into
            nonoverlapping optional modules.  Each household is
            systematically assigned the core module and randomly
            assigned one of the optional modules. Multiple imputation
            techniques are then used to estimate total household
            consumption.  Based on ex post simulations, the approach is
            demonstrated to yield reliable estimates of per capita
            consumption and poverty using data from a regular household
            budget survey collected in Hargeisa, Somaliland. The
            approach is then applied to a survey conducted in Mogadishu
            where interview time could not exceed 60 minutes.
International data flows and privacy
            : the conflict and its resolution
The free flow of data across borders
            underpins today's globalized economy. But the flow of
            personal data outside the jurisdiction of national
            regulators also raises concerns about the protection of
            privacy. Addressing these legitimate concerns without
            undermining international integration is a challenge. This
            paper describes and assesses three types of responses to
            this challenge: unilateral development of national or
            regional regulation, such as the European Union's Data
            Protection Directive and forthcoming General Data Protection
            Regulation; international negotiation of trade disciplines,
            most recently in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement
            for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP); and international
            cooperation involving regulators, most significantly in the
            EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Agreement. The paper argues that
            unilateral restrictions on data flows are costly and can
            hurt exports, especially of data-processing and other
            data-based services; international trade rules that limit
            only the importers' freedom to regulate cannot address
            the challenge posed by privacy; and regulatory cooperation
            that aims at harmonization and mutual recognition is not
            likely to succeed, given the desirable divergence in
            national privacy regulation. The way forward is to design
            trade rules (as the CPTPP seeks to do) that reflect the
            bargain central to successful international cooperation (as
            in the EU-US Privacy Shield): regulators in data destination
            countries would assume legal obligations to protect the
            privacy of foreign citizens in return for obligations on
            data source countries not to restrict the flow of data.
            Existing multilateral rules can help ensure that any such
            arrangements do not discriminate against and are open to
            participation by other countries.
The impact of positive agricultural
            income shocks on rural Chinese households
In the post-collectivization period,
            rural Chinese households were required to sell part of their
            grain output to the state at a below-market price; however,
            increases in this quota price beginning in 1993 generated
            substantial positive income shocks. These income shocks also
            varied cross-sectionally in accordance with crop composition
            given that quotas were systematically larger for
            rice-producing households, generating a quasi-random source
            of variation in the size of the shock driven by climatic
            variation in suitability for rice cultivation. Households
            induced to experience relatively larger income shocks show
            evidence of decreased agricultural investment, increased
            investment in non-agricultural businesses, and increased
            migration as households gain increased income, consistent
            with the hypothesis that credit constraints may have
            constrained some households from entering non-agricultural
            production ex ante. In addition, there is evidence that
            these households were concentrated among households who had
            not previously diversified out of agriculture.
Community-driven development : myths
            and realities
Community-driven development is an
            approach to development that emphasizes community control
            over planning decisions and investment resources. Over the
            past decade, it has become a key operational strategy for
            many national governments, as well as for international aid
            agencies, with the World Bank alone currently supporting
            more than 190 active community-driven development projects
            in 78 countries.  Community-driven development programs have
            proven to be particularly useful where government
            institutions are weak or under stress. This paper examines
            what the evidence shows about the utility of
            community-driven development programs for helping
            governments improve the lives and futures of the poor. The
            paper also addresses recent critiques of the
            community-driven development approach.  The paper makes
            three main arguments. First, community-driven development
            offers governments a useful new tool for improving the lives
            of the poor. The empirical evidence from evaluations
            confirms that community-driven development programs provide
            much needed productive economic infrastructure and services
            at large scale, reasonable cost, and high quality. They also
            provide villagers, especially the disadvantaged, with a
            voice in how development funds are used to improve their
            welfare.  Second, community-driven development programs are
            not a homogeneous category, and it is important to
            acknowledge the differences between national, on-budget,
            multi-year programs, and off-budget programs. And finally,
            community-driven development works best and achieves the
            greatest results when it is part of a broader development
            strategy that includes reforms to governance, investments in
            productivity, and integration with efforts to improve the
            quality of public service delivery.
Inflation, liquidity and innovation
This paper presents a simple model with
            financial frictions where inflation increases the cost faced
            by firms holding liquid assets to hedge risky production
            against expenditure shocks. Inflation tilts firms'
            technology choice away from innovative activities and toward
            safer but return-dominated ones, and therefore reduces
            long-run growth. The theory makes specific predictions about
            how the severity of this adverse effect depends on industry
            characteristics. These predictions are tested with novel
            harmonized firm-level data from 139 developing countries,
            overcoming small sample problems constraining previous work.
            The analysis finds that inflation affects the composition
            but not the overall quantity of investment. A one percentage
            point increase in inflation reduces the establishment-level
            probability of innovation by 4.3 percent but does not affect
            total investment. Moreover, innovating firms display a
            stronger dependence on liquid assets, which, in turn, are
            negatively related to inflation. Generalized
            difference-in-differences estimations corroborate the
            sector-specific predictions of the theoretical model.