rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
How do multinationals report their
            economic, social, and environmental impacts evidence from
            global reporting initiative data
This paper examines the role of
            multinational enterprises in sustainability reporting. The
            study assesses how multinational enterprise status
            correlates with a company's average disclosure rate and
            probability of reporting on economic, labor and social,
            environmental, and governance indicators. It uses a unique
            data set that offers company-level information on
            sustainability reporting from the Global Reporting
            Initiative, which covers 2,020 companies in 81 countries and
            54 sustainability indicators. The summary statistics show
            that multinational enterprises and large domestic companies
            have higher average disclosure rates than small and
            medium-size enterprises. However, the econometric analysis
            suggests that multinational enterprise status does not
            matter for the average disclosure rate, but company size
            shows a strongly positive correlation. Differentiating by
            type of multinational enterprise reveals that the
            relationship becomes positive and significant for private
            companies. By contrast, the correlation between
            multinational enterprise status and the average disclosure
            rate does not vary by listing status, sector, region, or
            income level. Focusing on the relationship by development
            category also shows no significant correlation. Finally,
            accounting for the heterogeneity of the sustainability
            indicators, the study analyzes the relationship between
            multinational enterprise status and the probability of
            disclosure at the detailed indicator level, and confirms a
            significant correlation for 12 indicators.
The impact of hurricane strikes on
            short-term local economic activity : evidence from
            nightlight images in the Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is highly exposed
            to adverse natural events putting the country at risk of
            losing hard-won economic, social, and environmental gains
            due to the impacts of disasters. This study uses monthly
            nightlight composites in conjunction with a wind field model
            to econometrically estimate the impact of tropical cyclones
            on local economic activity in the Dominican Republic since
            1992. It is found that the negative impact of storms lasts
            up to 15 months after the strike, with the largest effect
            observed after nine months. Translating the reduction in
            nightlight intensity into monetary losses by relating it to
            quarterly gross domestic product suggests that on average
            the storms reduced gross domestic product by about US$1.1
            billion (4.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2000 and
            1.5 percent in 2016).
Are psychometric tools a viable
            screening method for small and medium-size enterprise
            lending evidence from Peru
This study collaborated with the
            Entrepreneurial Finance Lab and a large bank in Peru to use
            psychometrics for small and medium-size enterprise lending.
            Applicants used a psychometric tool and those who achieved a
            score higher than a threshold were offered a loan. Using a
            regression discontinuity design and credit bureau data, the
            study finds that the tool increased small and medium-size
            enterprise loan use by up to 59 percentage points for
            applicants without a credit history, without leading to
            worse repayment behavior. This increase in borrowing
            resulted primarily from financial institutions other than
            the partner bank. For applicants with a credit history, the
            tool did not increase small and medium-size enterprise loan use.
Are psychometric tools a viable
            screening method for small and medium-size enterprise
            lending evidence from Peru
WPS8276 Policy Research Working Paper 8276 Are Psychometric Tools a Viable Screening Method for Small and Medium-Size Enterprise Lending?

Evidence from Peru _Irani Arráiz Miriam Bruhn Claudia Ruiz Ortega Rodolfo Stucchi_ Development Research Group Finance and Private Sector Development Team December 2017
The global costs of protectionism
This paper quantifies the wide-ranging
            costs of potential increases in worldwide barriers to trade
            in two scenarios. First, a coordinated global withdrawal of
            tariff commitments from all existing bilateral/regional
            trade agreements, as well as from unilateral preferential
            schemes coupled with an increase in the cost of traded
            services, is estimated to result in annual worldwide real
            income losses of 0.3 percent or US$211 billion relative to
            the baseline after three years. An important share of these
            losses is likely to be concentrated in regions such as East
            Asia and Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean which
            together account for close to one-third of the global
            decline in welfare. Highlighting the importance of
            preferences, the impact on global trade is estimated to be
            more pronounced, with an annual decline of 2.1 percent or
            more than US$606 billion relative to the baseline if these
            barriers stay in place for three years. Second, a worldwide
            increase in tariffs up to legally allowed bound rates
            coupled with an increase in the cost of traded services
            would translate into annual global real income losses of 0.8
            percent or more than US$634 billion relative to the baseline
            after three years. The distortion to the global trading
            system would be significant and result in an annual decline
            of global trade of 9 percent or more than US$2.6 trillion
            relative to the baseline in 2020.
Mobile infrastructure and rural
            business enterprises : evidence from sim registration
            mandate in Niger
Business enterprises and
            non-agricultural startups in rural economies play crucial
            roles in ending the vicious cycle of poverty. The
            propagation of business enterprises are, however, subject to
            a high degree of institutional frictions and vacuums e.g.,
            information; but mobile infrastructure which has the
            externality of flowing information can help overcome most of
            these vacuums through reduced fixed costs, lower cost of
            information or search, and outreach to a broader customer
            base. This paper studies the effects of mobile
            infrastructure ("mobile use activity") on
            propagation of rural business enterprises in Niger.
            Instrumental variable estimates exploit the exogenous
            introduction of the 2013 national mandatory SIM registration
            reform which provides a quasi-experimental set-up for mobile
            use and activity. The mandate deactivated about one-third of
            all existing prepaid SIMs and led to a remarkable decline in
            mobile use activity. The results suggest that there is
            economically substantial effect of mobile infrastructure on
            propagation of business enterprises. Moving a household with
            mobile use activity to a no mobile use activity environment
            due to SIM deactivation results in roughly 33.1 percent
            points decline in the likelihood of engaging in
            non-agricultural business enterprises. Most of this effect
            come from three major sources: households' ownership of
            a business service or center; ownership of small income
            generating activities; and involvement in the transformation
            of agricultural products. There is suggestive evidence that
            the reform's impact is disproportionately larger for
            women. With the expansion of mandatory SIM registration
            reforms in developing countries, the findings have extended
            implications in these contexts.
Business environment and firm
            performance in European lagging regions
This paper explores the relationship
            between the regional business environment, lagging regions,
            and firm performance in four European countries: Italy,
            Poland, Romania, and Spain. It combines firm-level data from
            Orbis measuring sales, employment, productivity, and
            profitability, with indicators from recently completed
            Subnational Doing Business studies in the four countries to
            examine if and how the business environment is associated
            with firm outcomes, and whether this is mediated by being
            located in a lagging region. The results indicate that firms
            located in regions with better business environments indeed
            display better performance, in employment and sales growth,
            as well as profitability. Moreover, the paper finds evidence
            that being located in a lagging region aggravates the impact
            of a poor business environment on firm performance. The
            results also highlight that it matters to distinguish
            between regions that are "low income" (relatively
            poor) and those that are "low growth" (stagnating
            but not necessarily poor). Firm performance, the business
            environment, and the relationship between the two are much
            stronger in the latter than in the former. Overall, the
            results suggest that policies that improve the business
            environment in lagging regions would be beneficial to the
            performance of firms in these regions, in growth,
            profitability, and investment.
Data gaps, data incomparability, and
            data imputation : a review of poverty measurement methods
            for data-scarce environments
This paper reviews methods that have
            been employed to estimate poverty in contexts where
            household consumption data are unavailable or missing. These
            contexts range from completely missing and partially missing
            consumption data in cross-sectional household surveys, to
            missing panel household data. The paper focuses on methods
            that aim to compare trends and dynamic patterns of poverty
            outcomes over time. It presents the various methods under a
            common framework, with pedagogical discussion on the
            intuition. Empirical illustrations are provided using
            several rounds of household survey data from Vietnam.
            Furthermore, the paper provides a practical guide with
            detailed instructions on computer programs that can be used
            to implement the reviewed techniques.
Selection, firm turnover, and
            productivity growth : do emerging cities speed up the process
This paper identifies and estimates the
            impact of firm entry and exit on plant-level productivity in
            Ethiopia as part of a selection mechanism that might be
            driving aggregate productivity growth in cities.
            Specifically, the paper investigates how firms’ entry and
            exit contribute to the pace of factor reallocation and total
            factor productivity growth within industries—and whether
            these processes occur in higher numbers and rates in larger
            cities. The analysis is carried out using establishment
            census data from Ethiopia that cover the period from year
            2000 to 2010. Importantly, these data include information on
            plants’ physical outputs and their prices, which allows
            distinguishing between revenue-based measures of total
            factor productivity (TFPR) and those based on physical
            productivity (TFPQ). The analysis reveals that these two
            measures generate very different results under imperfect
            competition, suggesting that physical productivity measures
            (TFPQ) are better suited to examining firm dynamics when
            local producers have some degree of market power. In
            addition, the findings show that less productive (higher
            cost) firms are more likely to exit than their more
            productive (lower cost) rivals—but the analysis controls for
            producers’ transport costs. This is consistent with the
            probability of firm exit being higher when transport costs
            are lower.
Can mothers afford to work in Poland
            : labor supply incentives of social benefits and childcare costs
This paper analyzes the incentives to
            labor supply faced by families, particularly mothers, with
            young children in the context of a recently introduced
            fertility promotion benefit in Poland. The paper is based on
            an adapted version of the Organisation for Economic
            Co-operation and Development's Tax-Benefit Model, which
            estimates households' net earnings after taxes and
            social transfers at different levels of wages. Since the
            recent introduction of the 500  benefit, some households
            face steep marginal tax rates due to the benefit withdrawal
            rules. Single parents with two children, and second earners
            with one child can expect their income to increase by only
            30 and 25 percent of the minimum wage, respectively, if they
            take up a job at minimum wage. If they must also pay for
            childcare, having all adults working can cause losses of up
            to 30 percent compared with if one adult stayed home.
            Although the 500  program radically contributed to reducing
            child poverty, in the absence of complementary reforms,
            these disincentives could affect more than half a million
            households, disproportionately in the lowest quintile.
            Vouchers for private childcare have been adopted by some
            municipalities in Poland to counter unmet demand for public
            nurseries. A 75 percent subsidy of typical childcare costs
            would restore the financial viability of low-paying work for
            mothers with young children. Alternative remedies include a
            reform of the eligibility and withdrawal rules of the 500  program.
Using gross trade data to map
            archetypal GVCs
This paper introduces a new, publicly
            available database for tracking merchandise trade in the
            global value chains for apparel/textile/footwear, motor
            vehicles and parts, and electronics, developed originally
            for in-depth analysis at the country level. The data enable
            tracking of intermediate and final goods trade by country.
            Among other results, the study finds that East Asia and
            Pacific is the most global value chain–intensive region, and
            Sub-Saharan Africa is the least global value chain–intensive
            region. Final assembly of motor vehicles is significantly
            more sophisticated (takes place in higher income countries),
            while final apparel is the least sophisticated global value
            chain category and is geographically dispersed. In general,
            intermediate goods are more likely to be traded within
            regions, and final goods are more likely to be traded
            between regions. South Asia produces a large value of
            relatively unsophisticated global value chain exports,
            focusing on apparel and textiles; North American exports are
            the most sophisticated. Within categories, the degree of
            product sophistication varies markedly.
Can we measure the power of the
            grabbing hand : a comparative analysis of different
            indicators of corruption
Sustainable Development Goal 16 is
            explicitly committed to measuring aspects of corruption over
            time, and the identification of robust indicators to do so
            is an important endeavor. This paper critically reviews the
            strengths and weaknesses of various objective and subjective
            indicators of corruption, using the standard criteria of
            validity and reliability to identify indicators most salient
            to measuring Sustainable Development Goal 16. Consistent
            with the large literature in the field, the paper finds that
            the aggregate survey-based indicators of corruption,
            especially the Corruption Perceptions Index and the World
            Bank's Control of Corruption indicator, despite some
            important reservations and limitations, are the most valid
            measures of the magnitude of overall corruption in many
            country contexts. However, in every case, the initial
            results using one indicator should be cross checked with the
            use of the other indicator, as there are some minor
            differences between how the two indicators are constructed,
            and in practice it is difficult to establish a priori which
            indicator is marginally more efficient. Furthermore,
            whenever possible, subjective indicators should be cross
            checked with objective indicators, even when the latter may
            be of a more narrow scope and time limited availability.
Insecurity and industrial
            organization : evidence from Afghanistan
One-fifth of the world's population
            lives in countries affected by fragility, violence and
            conflict, impeding long-term economic growth. However,
            little is known about how firms respond to local changes in
            security, partly because of the difficulty of measuring firm
            activity in these settings. This paper presents a novel
            methodology for observing private sector activity using
            mobile phone metadata. Using Afghanistan as the empirical
            setting, the analysis combines mobile phone data from over
            2,300 firms with data from several other sources to develop
            and validate measures of firm location, size, and economic
            activity. Combining these new measures of firm activity with
            geocoded data on violent events, the paper investigates how
            the private sector in Afghanistan responds to insecurity.
            The findings indicate that firms reduce presence in
            districts following major increases in violence, that these
            effects persist for up to six months, and that larger firms
            are more responsive to violence. The paper concludes with a
            discussion of potential mechanisms, firms' strategic
            adaptations, and implications for policymakers.
What Explains the Gender Gap
            Reversal in Educational Attainment
The reversal of the gender gap in
            educational attainment is becoming a global phenomenon. Its
            drivers, however, are not well understood and remain largely
            untested empirically. This paper develops a unified
            conceptual framework that allows to formulate and test two
            main hypotheses for the reversal. It introduces the tail
            hypothesis, which builds on the lower dispersion of
            scholastic performance among females observed globally. It
            also formalizes the mean hypothesis, which states that
            females' average scholastic performance and returns to
            education have increased over time relative to males'.
            The paper theoretically shows that both hypotheses can
            explain the reversal in our framework. The parameters of the
            two hypotheses derived from the model are then estimated
            using educational attainment data from 1950 to 2010 in more
            than 100 countries. The authors find that both hypotheses
            strongly predict the gender gap dynamics in educational
            attainment when estimated separately. When jointly
            estimated, accounting for the tail hypothesis significantly
            increases the model's predictive power. The
            contribution of the tail hypothesis to the gender gap
            reversal, while the mean hypothesis appears to prevail in
            high-income countries.
Impact of phone reminders on survey
            response rates : evidence from a web-based survey in an
            international organization
This research note investigates the
            impact of phone reminders on response rates in the context
            of a web-based survey in an international organization, the
            World Bank. After randomly assigning treatment to 248 survey
            participants, the study finds an intention-to-treat effect
            of 19.86 percentage points. Given a relatively low treatment
            compliance rate (31 percent), the estimated average effect
            of treatment-on-the-treated is even larger, corresponding to
            an increase of 64 percentage points. Therefore, if ways can
            be found to increase treatment compliance, high response
            rates are attainable. This may lead World Bank surveyors to
            turn to sample surveys more often, reducing survey overload
            in the institution.
Female migration in Lesotho :
            determinants and opportunities
Migration, internal and external,
            continues to be a dominant livelihood strategy for
            households in Lesotho, with almost half (43 percent) of
            households reporting at least one member living away. The
            past decade has seen a sharp increase in female migration,
            due to a halt in new hires of Basotho men in South African
            mines and a concomitant expansion of jobs primarily for
            women in the export garment sector in Maseru and Maputsoe.
            This study analyzes female migration using three waves of
            the Demographic and Health Survey (2004, 2009, and 2014) as
            well as primary data collected by the research team in
            March-April 2015. The findings indicate that female
            migration in Lesotho is primarily driven by economic
            "push" (rather than "pull") factors,
            often due to shocks to the household, such as job loss,
            death, or bad crops. Migrants are often seen as
            "strugglers" and their households of origin are
            just as poor as rural households with no migrants. Moreover,
            the study finds conclusive evidence that women's
            employment in sectors dominated by migrants is strongly
            correlated with HIV/AIDS: 55 percent of women working in
            garment factories and 38 percent of domestic workers are HIV
            positive, as opposed to the national average of 30 percent.
            These findings point to three policy recommendations to
            support female migrants and their families: (i) lower the
            barriers to secondary education in rural areas, (ii)
            diversify and expand employment opportunities for men and
            women, and (iii) provide HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment
            services to garment factory workers as well as migrants
            working in the informal sector.