rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
# EXAMINATION OF EVIDENCE

The basic steps of the impact evaluations examined in this study are the specification of a conceptual framework, the actual implementation of the project and the attribution of causality. The present analysis emphasizes the importance of the first two steps (conceptualization, implementation) of impact evaluation. It turns out that both the anticipation of a large decline in mortality as a result of ORT use and the statements conceming proper management of episodes were based on very weak information. The paper then presents a new analysis of changing mortality trends using a regression discontinuity analysis which avoids biased inferences due to choices of specific starting or ending years.

# 1- Conceptualization

Conceptualization refers to a spelling out of causal mechanisms. Specifying in detail the course of actions through which program activities lead to envisaged effects is important because it allows a sound choice of suitable outcome measures and plausible theoretical quantification of potential impact.

In general, G:'T (with all its elements of ORS, nLrition and hygienic practices) has the potential for reducing case fatality of acute watery diarrhea (ORS and nutrition provides replacement of fluid and electrolytes to combat dehydration). The therapy reduces case fatality of all types of diarrhea and indeed of other diseases also (through its effect on nutritional status that in turn influences host resistance) and even reduces the incidence rates of diseases (improved nutritional status alters immuno-competence and better hygienic practices reduce exposure risks).

In the Egyptian program, the early messages focused on ORS and the evidence that has been cited suggests no change in either nutritional status or incidence rates. Thus, one route of impact is specified: The reduction of case fatality of acute watery diarrhea due to better palliative case management of episodes. The proper outcome variable is deaths due to dehydration and the theoretical quantification is strongly related to that.

The first step in the analysis examines the possible theoretical impact of eradicating all dehydration deaths in Egypt. Two points need to be considered:

- Cause of death statistics in Egypt are known to be inaccurate. The 50 % level of diarrhea associated deaths may be too high. This in itself may be overstating the potential impact of the ORT program.

- Dehydration deaths represent only some proportion of all diarrhea associated deaths. There is a need to quantify this proportion better to avoid another possible source of overestimation of potential impact.

To discuss these two points, we need better information on the cause of death structure in Egypt and an estimate of what proportion dehydration deaths are of all diarrheal deaths. The 8
|Dependent Variable:|**Table A4(con**|**tinued): Explo**|**ring Mechanis**<br>Dum|**ms for Conflict**<br>my=1 if anyBAT|**in Irrigated Lan**<br>TLE in a cell-ye|**ds**<br>ar|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||(9)|(10)<br>Rest of SSA(|(11)<br>excludingG5)|(12)|(13)|(14)<br>North Afr|(15)<br>ica(MENA)|(16)|
|Ln(Share Irrigated) X Post|-0.000559|0.000723|-0.00917*|-0.00115|-0.0171**|0.0226**|0.0490***|0.000587|
||(0.00837)|(0.00471)|(0.00474)|(0.00978)|(0.0076)|(0.00888)|(0.00989)|(0.00993)|
|...X Post X Ln(pop)|<br>-0.000397|||<br>-0.000265|<br>0.00626***|||<br>0.00855***|
||(0.000864)|||(0.000865)|(-0.00116)|||(0.00126)|
|... X Post X Wetland||<br>-0.00822||<br>-0.00807||<br>0.00975||<br>-0.00265|
|||(0.00562)||(0.00561)||(0.00976)||(0.00888)|
|... X historically Agricultural Ethnic<br>Homeland|||<br>0.00877|<br>0.0088|||<br>-0.0375***|<br>-0.0622***|
||||(0.00701)|(0.00702)|||(0.012)|(0.0123)|
|Observations|127580|127580|127580|127580|40540|40540|40540|40540|
|R-sq|0.372|0.372|0.372|0.372|0.409|0.405|0.407|0.415|
|Country-Year FE|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|
|Cell FE|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|
|Controls X Time|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|
|Climate Controls<br>Each observation corresponds to a 50km x 50km grid-|Y<br>cell observed in a give|Y<br>n year between 19|Y<br>98 and 2017. The o|Y<br>utcome variable is a d|Y<br>ummy variable indicat|Y<br>ing that the grid-c|Y<br>ell experienced a ba|Y<br>ttle event in a given|

Each observation corresponds to a 50km x 50km grid-cell observed in a given year between 1998 and 2017. The outcome variable is a dummy variable indicating that the grid-cell experienced a battle event in a given year, as reported in the ACLED dataset. Irrigated area is measured as the percentage share of an average plot of land that is equipped for irrigation, as documented by Siebert et al (2015). Controls include log of population at the start of the period as well as dummies to indicate the presence of wetlands, croplands, pasture lands, rivers and the homelands of ethnic groups that historically relied on agricultural livelihood strategies. Standard errors in parentheses clustered at the grid-cell level. Climate controls include mean temperature and log of total rainfall in the wet and dry seasons. * p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01" 29
instruments do not systematically violate the exclusion restriction.

In Table 3 we show that there are no significant reduced form effects. Changes in neither the agricultural commodity price index nor the natural resource commodity price index are significantly correlated with changes in the absolute value of the RRA. We also do not find a significant reduced form effect of year-to-year variations in rainfall. This is true regardless of whether we consider the largest possible Sub-Saharan African sample (column (1)); exclude observations in the top/bottom 1 percentile of GDP per capita growth (column (2)); exclude the pre-1985 period (column (3)); or include additional within-country control variables on the right-hand side of the regression (column (4)). Hence, despite Table 2 showing that international commodity price shocks and rainfall shocks have a highly significant effect on GDP per capita growth of Sub-Saharan African countries, Table 3 shows that there are no significant reduced-form effects. The reduced-form estimates in Table 3 therefore echo the insignificant instrumental variables estimates, reported in Panel A of Table 2, which show that there is no significant impact response of changes in the absolute RRA to plausibly exogenous variations in real GDP per capita growth.

A more intuitive way to demonstrate that rainfall and international commodity price shocks are valid instruments is to report the effects that rainfall and international commodity price shocks have on the absolute RRA conditional on GDP per capita growth. In Panel A of Table 4 we report estimates for instrumenting GDP per capita growth with the change in the international commodity export price index and including rainfall on the right-hand side of the second-stage equation. In Panel B of Table 4 we report estimates for instrumenting GDP per capita growth with the change in rainfall and including the international commodity export price index on the right-hand side of the second-stage equation. Both panels show that, conditional on GDP per capita growth, rainfall and international commodity price shocks do not have significant effects on the change in the absolute RRA. Hence, when conditioning on GDP per capita we find that there are no significant effects of rainfall and international commodity price shocks on the absolute relative rate of assistance. This 14
depreciation is counted as a source of finance than when depreciation is not counted as a source of finance, since depreciation is such a large item on both sides of the account when it is counted as a source of finance.

As a starting point, it is useful to note the results of Mayer (1988, 1990), who investigated the corporate financing patterns for the U.S., UK, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and Finland for the 1970 to 1985 period based on the flow of funds accounts of these countries. The main findings of Mayer (1988, 1990) are: (i) retentions are the dominant source of finance in all countries; (ii) corporations do not raise a substantial amount of finance from the stock market in any one country; and (iii) banks are the dominant source of external finance in all countries, especially in France, Italy, and Japan.

These results can also be compared with that of Samuel (1995b), based on the cash flow statements of 533 U.S. manufacturing firms for the 1972-1987 period. The main findings of Samuel (1995a) are: (i) the financing hierarchy hypothesis is broadly supported when the sources and uses of funds analysis is conducted on a gross as well as net basis;<sup>6</sup> (ii) on a net basis, the contribution of equity to the total sources of funds is negative; (iii) firms issue debt and equity to retire existing commitments rather than to finance capital expenditures, which appears to be done primarily through internal finance; and (iv) external finance plays a limited role with regard to capital expenditures.

# **Investment theories and the role of finance**

The next issue to consider is the predictions of the alternative theories of investment According to the financing hierarchy (pecking order) hypothesis, the firm's preference for sources of finance run from internal finance to debt to equity. This is discussed in greater detail later on.

4
Policy Research Working Paper 6076

# **Abstract**

Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study 2008 pilot, this paper analyzes the patterns and correlates of intergenerational transfers between elderly parents and adult children in Zhejiang and Gansu Provinces. The pilot is a unique data source from China that provides information on the direction as well as amount of transfers between parents and each of their children, and clearly distinguishes transfers between parents and children from those among other relatives or friends. The paper shows that transfers flow predominantly from children to elderly parents, with transfers from children playing an important role in elderly support. Taking advantage of the rich information available in this survey, the authors find strong evidence that transfers are significantly affected by the financial capabilities of individual children. Educated and married children have a higher tendency to provide transfers to their parents; and oldest sons are less likely to provide transfers than their younger brothers. With future continued rapid economic growth in China, the income disadvantage of the elderly will persist and upward generational transfers will likely remain the most common form of private transfers. In the absence of some other source of elderly support (such as a public pension or own savings), the dwindling number of children implies that the financial burden associated with supporting the elderly is likely to increase.

This paper is a product of the Human Development and Public Services Team, Development Research Group. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contacted at jgiles@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
The household survey collects information on a range of variables: household roster, household expenditures, educational history, health, child and parental time use, child care, child ability, school information and ranking, teacher information, mobility, household learning environment, and more. In the first year, the household survey is administered to both one male and one female member of the household. In the second year, only one member (either male or female) responds to this questionnaire.

# **C. Report Card Design and Delivery**

The content, design, and delivery of the report cards were based on focus group discussions with parents and schools, where the consensus was that parents wanted both the (absolute and relative) scores of their child and of schools in their village. The two main design challenges we had to address were that (a) school-level test scores potentially reflect a combination of school performance and child selection and (b) test information may be insufficiently granular to allow households to distinguish between different kinds of schools.

# 1) Content and Design

To assess whether raw test scores, which we eventually used, were preferable to value-added test scores (where we parse out the contribution of observed characteristics of households and children), we ran a set of regressions with the school test scores as the dependent variable and varying sets of parental and child characteristics as the explanatory variables. In each of these regressions, the joint contribution of parental and child characteristics was small and there was little difference between the value-added and the raw scores (see Das, Pandey & Zajonc, 2012). We traded off the small difference in school rankings with the fact that explaining value-added scores to both parents and schools was harder, lacked transparency, and ignored the possibility that parents themselves had information that was not available to us. For instance, in focus group meetings, parents sometimes raised issues about teachers in certain schools that could explain performance—information that remained unobserved to us as researchers.

We were also concerned about measurement error in test scores and the ability of our tests to distinguish among different types of schools. Using the estimated errors from the item response methods, we computed for every school the measurement error in the tests. Figure 3, for instance, shows box plots of the mean score and the measurement error for all schools in a single village: the high variance in test scores across schools implies that the reliability of our school rankings was fairly high (the ratio of the variance of the measurement error to the variance of test
<!-- Start of picture text --> Policy Research<br>Counlry Operations<br>WPS 1055<br><!-- End of picture text --> This paperis a prGduct of the Latin America and the Caribbean Technical Department. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Caroline Banton, room 14-049, extension 34783 (December 1992,42 pages).

Despite the growing evidence that farmers in low-income environments are risk-averse, there ha. been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth.

Rosenzweig and Binswanger use panel data on investments in rural India to examine how the composition of productive and nonproductive asset holdings varies across farmers with different levels of total wealth and across farmers facing different degrees of weather risk.

Income variability is a prominent feature of the experience of rural agents in low-income countries. Rosenzweig and Binswanger report evidence, based on measures of rainfall variability, that the agricultural investment portfolio behavior of farmers in such settings reflects risk aversion, due evidently to limitations on consumption-smoothing mechanisms such as crop insurance or credit markets. The authors' results suggest that uninsured weather risk is a significant cause of lower efficiency and lower average incomes: A one-standard-deviation decrease in weather risk (measured by the standard deviation of the timing of the rainy season) would raise average profits by up to 35 percent among farmers in the lowest wealth quartile.

Moreover, rainfall variability induces a more unequal distribution of average incomes for a given distribution of wealth. Wealthier farmers are willing to absorb significant risk without giving up profits to reduce production risk. Smaller farmers have to invest their limited wealth in ways that reduce their exposure to risk at the cost of lower profit rates.

The authors found that at high levels of rainfall variability, differences in rates of profit per unit of agricultural assets were similar across, classes of wealth. But over the sample range of rainfall variability, these rates of profit were always higher for the poorer farmers than for the wealthier ones, suggesting that the disadvantages of small farmers in risk diffusion are more than offset by their labor cost advantage.

The Policy Research Working PaperSeries disseninates thefudings of work underway in theBak Anobjectiveof the series is to got these fndings out qulickly, even if presntations are less than fully polished. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in these papers do not necessarily represent of ficial Bank policy.

Piroduced by the Policy Research Dissemination Center
order to improve the comparability of their scores with 2005.<sup>6</sup> We then continue backwards in time in the same way to adjust the 2003 data. In particular, we look at the entrants to the sample in 2003 relative to 2005, and compute the average score for these countries, using either the 2004 estimates if they are available, or else the 2005 estimates if the country shows up in the sample only in 2005. We then again adjust the 2003 estimates so that a hypothetical sample consisting of the 2003 adjusted scores as well as either the 2004 or 2005 scores of the entrants, whichever is closer to 2003, would have a mean of zero. We continue in this way back to 1996.

Four points are worth noting about this new adjustment.

- Since we adjust the scores for all countries in a given year and indicator by the same amount, this adjustment has no effect on the relative positions of countries on that indicator in that year.  It does however make countries' scores more comparable over time, since the adjustment is designed to remove the effect of adding new countries on the scores of countries already in the sample.

- As a consequence of this adjustment, global averages of the adjusted data show moderate trends over time, mostly improvements.  The most extreme case is that of Political Stability and Absence of Violence where the average across all countries in the sample improves from -0.15 in 1996 to 0 in 2005.  It is important to remember though that this improvement does not reflect an average

6 The adjustment factor for the mean is simply − y T ⋅ (NT − NT−1)/ NT−1 where NT is the number of

> countries with data in period T and y T is the average score of the additional countries in period T.  The higher is the average score of the new entrants and/or the more new entrants there are, the more we lower the mean in the previous period.   This ensures that a hypothetical sample consisting of our year T-1 adjusted scores for all countries combined with the year T scores for the countries added in year T relative to T-1 would have a mean of zero and standard deviation of one. We also adjust the standard deviation of the year T scores to ensure that the standard deviation of this hypothetical sample would be one.  We do this by multiplying the scores (and the standard errors) for each country in 2004 by a factor of

estimates of governance in year T for the new entrants to the sample in period T. The greater is the dispersion in the scores of new entrants, the more we need to reduce the dispersion of scores in the previous years. The adjustments to the standard deviation are in all cases quite small, ranging from 0.96 to 1.08 with a mean adjustment factor of 1 (i.e. no adjustment at all). The adjustments to the means are somewhat higher, particularly in earlier periods where we had smaller samples, and range from -0.20 to 0.01. The interested reader can retrieve all of these adjustment factors simply by calculating the mean and standard deviation of our governance indicators in each period.

10
United Kingdom. 1989. "The Aged Deserving Poor." Report presented at the United Kingdom Parliament meeting, London.

"United Kingdom, Social Trends 1992". 1992. Central Statistical Office.

UN (United Nations). 1991. "Economic and Social Aspects of Population Ageing in Argentina." New York: UN.

# -. 1992b. _Demographic Yearbook._ New York.

U.S. Bureau of the Census. Various years. _Current Population Reports Series P-60_ (annual). Washington, D.C.

U.S. Social Security Administration. 1993. _Social Security Programs Throughout the World -_ Washington, D.C.

.- various years. _Social Security Bulletin_ (annual). Washington, D.C.

Uthoff, Andras and Rachel Szalachman. 1992. "Sistema de Pensiones en America Latina:Diagnostico y Alternativas de Reforma." Santiago, Chile: CEPAL.

Valdes-Prieto, Salvador. 1993. "Administrative Costs in the Chilean Pension System: Evidence from an International Comparison." World Bank, Policy Research Department, Washington, D.C.

-. 1993. (Instituto de Economia, U. Catolica, Chile). Administrative Charges in Pensions: Chile, the U.S., Malaysia and Zambia. Unpbublished.

Van den Noord, Paul and Richard Herd (OECD). Economics Department [Working Paper]. Pension Liabilities in the Seven Major Economies. Paris: OECD; 1993.

"Venezuela: Los Costos de Seguridad Social en el Sector Puiblico Descentralizado". 1991. MHV Ministerio de Hacienda de Venezuela.

Vicente, Ana. 1993. El Sistema de Seguridad Social en Espafia. Regimenes Pensionales.

Vittas, Dimitri and Augusto Iglesias (World Bank). 1992.Country Economics Department. The Rationale and Performance of Personal Pension Plans in Chile. Washington, D.C.: World Bank; (February). (Policy Research Working Papers).

.- 1992. "Options for Pension Reform in Tunisia" Financial Policy and Systems Division, Country Economics Department. Unpublished (June) .- 1992. "Swiss Chilanpore: The Way Forward for Pension Reforn?" Unpublished mimeo. (November).

139