rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
One Rule Fits All Heterogeneous
            Fiscal Rules for Commodity Exporters When Price Shocks Can
            Be Persistent: Theory and Evidence
Commodity-exporting developing economies
            are often characterized as having needlessly procyclical
            fiscal policy: spending when commodity prices are high and
            cutting back when prices fall. The standard policy advice is
            instead to save during price windfalls and maintain spending
            during price busts. This paper questions this
            characterization and policy advice. Using a New Keynesian
            model, it finds that optimal fiscal policy is heterogeneous
            depending on the commodity exported and exchange rate
            regime. Optimal fiscal policy is often procyclical in
            countries with floating exchange rates because many
            commodity price shocks are highly persistent, and so they
            should be spent according to the permanent income
            hypothesis. In contrast, in countries with fixed exchange
            rates, optimal fiscal policy becomes countercyclical to
            smooth the business cycle. Empirically, the paper introduces
            a new measure of fiscal cyclicality, the marginal propensity
            to spend (MPS) an extra dollar of commodity revenues, and
            shows that it is moderately procyclical overall but highly
            heterogeneous across countries depending on their
            characteristics. Consistent with theory, the MPS is more
            procyclical in countries with floating exchange rates than
            those with fixed exchange rates. Moreover, in countries with
            floating exchange rates, the MPS is higher in countries
            facing more persistent commodity price shocks.
Implications of Cheap Oil for
            Emerging Markets
The COVID-19-triggered collapse in oil
            prices in March and April 2020 was the seventh, and by far
            the most severe, in a series of such collapses since 1970.
            This paper, first, compares this most recent collapse and
            its drivers with previous ones in an event study. It finds
            that it was associated with an exceptionally severe plunge
            in oil demand. Second, in a local projections model, this
            paper estimates the implications of demand- and
            supply-driven oil price collapses for growth in emerging
            markets and developing economies (EMDEs). The paper finds
            that steep oil price collapses were associated with
            significant and lasting output losses in energy-exporting
            EMDEs but no meaningful output gains in energy-importing
            EMDEs. These results are robust to multiple robustness checks.
When Goal-Setting Forges Ahead but
            Stops Short
This paper reports the results of an
            at-scale randomized controlled trial among 18,000 secondary
            students in Zanzibar (Tanzania) to examine the effects of
            personal best goal-setting on student outcomes. The paper
            also tests the impact of combining goal setting with
            non-financial rewards conditional on students meeting the
            goals they set. The results suggest that goal-setting has a
            significant, positive impact on students' time use,
            study effort, and self-discipline. However, there are no
            significant impacts on test scores. This is partially
            because nearly two-thirds of the students do not set
            realistic goals. The paper finds that the effects on time
            use, study effort, and discipline are weaker when goal
            setting is combined with nonfinancial rewards. This suggests
            that tying goal setting to extrinsic incentives could weaken
            its impact. The results show stronger impacts for female
            students and from students from weaker socioeconomic
            backgrounds. These results demonstrate that goal setting can
            have positive impacts on student outcomes, especially for
            the relatively disadvantaged. However, for maximizing the
            impacts, goal setting may need to be combined with guidance
            on setting realistic goals, and extrinsic rewards tied to
            goals may need to be avoided.
Urban Design, Public Spaces, and
            Social Cohesion : Evidence from a Virtual Reality Experiment
Public spaces can be an instrument to
            increase social cohesion, yet they are often underutilized.
            This paper presents findings from a randomized virtual
            reality experiment with more than 2,000 participants in
            Karachi, Pakistan. The paper investigates the relationship
            between urban design, willingness to use public spaces, and
            social cohesion. The findings show that exposure to a
            two-and-a-half-minute-long virtual reality experience
            featuring various urban design and social diversity elements
            has a statistically significant impact. In particular,
            improvements in the design of a public park through the
            virtual reality experience increased the park's
            perceived attractiveness and participants~^!!^ willingness
            to use it. Exposure to diverse social groups in the virtual
            reality experience, by itself, had mixed impacts on social
            cohesion indicators such as trust and perception of and
            willingness to interact with outgroups. The impacts varied
            by ethnic affiliation, income, sex, and education level.
            This may be partly explained by the segregated nature of
            Karachi and the high prevalence of mistrust of outgroups.
            The paper illustrates how modern technology can be used as
            an effective, low-cost tool for diagnosing social phenomena,
            soliciting feedback about urban interventions for inclusive
            design, and promoting social contact.
The Role of Inequality for Poverty Reduction
Using World Bank PovcalNet data from
            1974-2018 for 135 countries, this paper approximates the
            identity that links growth in mean incomes and changes in
            the distribution of relative incomes to reductions in
            absolute poverty, and, in turn, examines the role of income
            inequality for poverty reduction. The analysis finds that
            the assumption that income is log-normally distributed
            allows one to approximate the identity well. Using this
            approximation, both the growth and inequality elasticities
            of poverty reduction are calculated. The inequality
            elasticity of poverty reduction is larger, on average,
            compared to the (absolute) growth elasticity of poverty
            reduction. Moreover, the (absolute) growth elasticity
            declines steeply with a country's initial level of
            inequality. However, despite these results, most of the
            observed changes in poverty can be explained by changes in
            mean incomes. This is a consequence of changes in income
            inequality (as measured by percentage changes in the
            standard deviation of log-income) being an order of
            magnitude smaller than changes in mean incomes. Overall, the
            results highlight the important role income inequality can
            play in reducing poverty even if prior poverty changes have,
            in large part, been a consequence of economic growth.
Estimating the Demand for Business
            Training : Evidence from Jamaica
Business training programs are typically
            offered for free. Charging for training provides potential
            benefits including financial sustainability, but little is
            known about how price affects the demand for training. This
            study conducted two experiments in Jamaica using the
            Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism and take-it-or-leave-it
            offers to estimate the demand for training. Most
            entrepreneurs have a positive willingness to pay for
            training, but demand falls sharply as price increases: in
            the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak experiment, 76 percent of the
            entrepreneurs attend training when it is free, but only 43
            percent attend when they are charged one-quarter of the
            cost, and only 11 percent when charged the full cost.
            Providing a credit option did not increase willingness to
            pay. Higher prices screen out poorer, older, and more
            risk-averse business owners, and those who expect to benefit
            less from training and have a low value of sales. However,
            charging a higher price increases attendance among those who
            pay, suggesting a psychological effect where paying for
            training makes firms value it more.
Revised Estimates of the Impact of
            Climate Change on Extreme Poverty by 2030
Thousands of scenarios are used to
            provide updated estimates for the impacts of climate change
            on extreme poverty in 2030. The range of the number of
            people falling into poverty due to climate change is between
            32 million and 132 million in most scenarios. These results
            are commensurate with available estimates for the global
            poverty increase due to COVID-19. Socioeconomic drivers play
            a major role: optimistic baseline scenarios (rapid and
            inclusive growth with universal access to basic services in
            2030) halve poverty impacts compared with the pessimistic
            baselines. Health impacts (malaria, diarrhea, and stunting)
            and the effect of food prices are responsible for most of
            the impact. The effect of food prices is the most important
            factor in Sub-Saharan Africa, while health effects, natural
            disasters, and food prices are all important in South Asia.
            These results suggest that accelerated action to boost
            resilience is urgent, and the COVID-19 recovery packages
            offer opportunities to do so.
Life Expectancy at Birth and
            Lifetime Education and Earnings
Exploiting cross–birth cohort and
            cross-country variation from a pool of 188 household surveys
            from 111 countries, this paper measures how life expectancy
            at birth affects lifetime education and earnings. On
            average, individuals add one year of schooling for every 8.3
            years of increased life expectancy at birth. Lifetime
            earnings increase by 1.7 percent per year of added life
            expectancy at birth. The estimates imply that rising life
            expectancy at birth explains 75 percent of the increase in
            average years of schooling worldwide for birth cohorts
            between 1922 and 1987 and 38 percent of the increase in
            average gross domestic product per capita in the 20th century.
Transportation and the Environment :
            A Review of Empirical Literature
In urban areas around the world,
            increasing motorization and growing travel demand make the
            urban transportation sector an ever-greater contributor to
            local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The
            situation is particularly acute in developing countries,
            where growing metropolitan regions suffer some of the
            world’s highest levels of air pollution. Policies that seek
            to develop and manage this transportation sector—to meet
            rising demand linked to economic growth and safeguard the
            environment and human health—have had strikingly different
            results, with some inadvertently exacerbating the traffic
            and pollution they seek to mitigate. This paper provides an
            overview of the findings of the recent literature on the
            impacts of a host of urban transportation policies used in
            developed and developing country settings. The paper
            identifies research challenges and future areas of study of
            transportation policies, which can have important,
            long-lasting impacts on urban life and global climate change.
How Do Small Formal and Informal
            Firms in the Arab Republic of Egypt Compare
Formalizing firms can potentially
            increase the tax base, expand safety and social protections
            for workers, create good jobs, and grow the economy.
            However, the costs and processes of formality may be too
            challenging for firms, particularly the smallest firms, to
            bear. Thus, informal firms may not be able to survive the
            transition to formality and attempts to expand formality may
            be harmful and counterproductive to job creation and growth.
            This paper investigates the potential for currently informal
            firms to formalize in the Arab Republic of Egypt. The paper
            compares the characteristics and dynamics of micro and small
            non-agricultural firms by formality and identifies the
            extent of overlap and potential for formalization. The
            analysis finds that, beyond firm size, the basic and easily
            observable characteristics of firms are not closely linked
            to formality. Firm age, productivity, and owner
            characteristics such as education are strongly predictive of
            formality. There is some overlap in the predicted
            probability of formality between formal and informal firms,
            suggesting some potential for formalization. The paper
            develops profiles (groups and clusters) of similar firms to
            identify those with a higher potential for formalization. In
            terms of dynamics, new firms tend to be informal and
            informal firms are more likely to exit (close), but
            conditional on firm survival, employment growth is similar
            across formal and informal firms.
The Contribution of Short-Cycle
            Programs to Student Outcomes : Evidence from Colombia
Short-cycle higher education programs
            (SCPs), lasting two or three years, capture about a quarter
            of higher education enrollment in the world and can play a
            key role enhancing workforce skills. This paper estimates
            the program-level contribution of SCPs to student academic
            and labor market outcomes, and studies how and why these
            contributions vary across programs. This paper exploits
            unique administrative data from Colombia on the universe of
            students, institutions, and programs to control for a rich
            set of student, peer, and local choice set characteristics.
            Results indicate that program-level contributions account
            for about 60&#x2013;70 percent of the variation in
            student-level graduation and labor market outcomes.
            Estimates show that programs vary greatly in their
            contributions, across and especially within fields of study.
            Moreover, the estimated contributions are strongly
            correlated with program outcomes but not with other commonly
            used quality measures. Programs contribute more to formal
            employment and wages when they are longer, have been
            provided for a longer time, are taught by more specialized
            institutions, and are offered in larger cities.
The Voice of Foreign Direct
            Investment : Foreign Investor Policy Preferences and
            Experiences in Developing Countries
This paper provides insights to inform
            government efforts to attract and retain foreign direct
            investment, by analyzing the results of a survey of more
            than 2,400 affiliates of multinational enterprises across 10
            middle-income countries. The paper explores corporate
            perspectives and decision-making on countries’ legal and
            regulatory environments, political risk, and investment
            promotion activities. The survey finds that a
            business-friendly policy environment is critical to
            multinational enterprises’ investment decisions, confirming
            the importance of removing regulatory barriers to foreign
            direct investment (particularly approval processes),
            lowering political risks, and having investment promotion
            agencies. The survey results also show that investors are
            heterogeneous, with affiliates’ sectors, trading behaviors,
            sizes, ages, source countries, and foreign ownership levels
            affecting their perceptions of and sensitivity to various
            policy factors. Thus, policy makers should tailor their
            policy efforts to the needs of priority investor segments.
            Notably, the analysis consistently finds variation based on
            the extent to which affiliates import their inputs,
            suggesting that this relatively understudied topic deserves
            increased research and policy attention.
Raising College Access and
            Completion : How Much Can Free College Help
Free college proposals have become
            increasingly popular in many countries, yet cross-country
            evidence indicates that higher college subsidies raise
            enrollment but not graduation rates. To capture the evidence
            and evaluate proposals, this paper develops and estimates a
            dynamic model of college enrollment, performance, and
            graduation. A central piece of the model, student effort,
            has a direct effect on class completion and an indirect
            effect mitigating the risk of performing poorly or dropping
            out. The model is estimated  using rich student-level data
            from Colombia, and multiple free college programs are
            simulated. Among them, universal free college expands
            enrollment the most but does not affect graduation rates,
            thereby helping explain the evidence. Performance-based free
            college, in contrast, raises graduation rates yet has a
            smaller enrollment impact.
Global Technology for Local
            Monitoring of Air Pollution in Dhaka
The World Health Organization attributes
            about 3.3 million annual premature deaths to outdoor air
            pollution in low- and middle-income countries. Comprehensive
            pollution monitoring in urban areas has been too costly for
            many developing countries; yet sparse information has
            hindered cost-effective pollution management strategies.
            Global information technologies offer a potential escape
            from this information trap, but their accuracy remains
            uncertain. This paper uses ground-based measures of fine
            particulates and nitrogen dioxide, provided by the CAMS-3
            Darussalam monitoring station in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to test
            three global technologies: the European Space Agency’s
            Sentinel-5P, the National Aeronautics and Space
            Administration’s Moderate Resolution Imaging
            Spectroradiometer, and Google Traffic. The results indicate
            that all three global technologies can provide useful
            information for extension of air pollution measurement
            beyond the few areas that are currently monitored by ground
            stations. Each technology tracks ground-based fine
            particulates measures with high significance, and the
            European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P and Google Traffic
            perform similarly for ground-based nitrogen dioxide
            measures.  Google Traffic can provide accurate tracking at
            higher spatial and temporal resolution than the satellite
            sources, but only for emissions from motor vehicles in major
            metro areas. The Moderate Resolution Imaging
            Spectroradiometer and the European Space Agency’s
            Sentinel-5P capture the effects of emissions from other
            sources at all locations.
In It to Win It Self-Esteem and
            Income-Earning among Couples
This paper investigates whether the
            relative self-esteem level of spouses can lead to within-
            household competition for inputs and affect economic gender
            inequality in the home. Using data on smallholder farmer
            couples in Cote d'Ivoire, the paper examines the
            relationship between spouses' self-esteem and
            income-earning in agriculture. Although the link between own
            self-esteem and crop income earning is positive, there is a
            "battle of the sexes" in which one spouse's
            self-esteem is negatively related to the other's income
            earning, particularly income earning in higher-value,
            export-oriented agriculture. Women's outcomes are more
            sensitive to their own self-esteem (positively) and to their
            partners' (negatively) than men's. This negative
            relationship is driven by individuals during middle age,
            when self-esteem is considered most stable. A key channel
            through which self-esteem appears to matter is by increasing
            control over household land, which is a scarce but crucial
            input to agricultural production. In addition to confirming
            the importance of noncognitive skills for poverty reduction
            in rural settings, the findings highlight the importance of
            their impact on intra- and inter-household inequality,
            especially in the presence of interlocking market failures
            constraining the supply of inputs to production.
Exporting and Female Labor Market
            Outcomes in Georgia
Using firm-level data for Georgia, the
            paper estimates the quasi-elasticity of employment and wages
            with respect to the share of exports in total sales, to
            explore whether changes in the structure of sales (exporting
            versus selling to the domestic market) matter for labor
            market outcomes. The methodology uses exogenous fluctuations
            in exchange rates combined with firms' initial exposure
            to various markets as instrumental variables to identify a
            causal effect. The results differentiate employment levels
            and average wages by gender and consider whether export
            destination or the competiveness of economies matters for
            the magnitude of this elasticity. The data are from the
            National Statistics Office of Georgia Statistics Survey of
            Enterprises merged with customs data for 2006-17. The
            instrumental variables regression results show that the act
            of exporting improves female employment but reduces overall
            average wages and female wages. Increasing exports to the
            European Union as well as high-income countries drives this
            positive result for female employment, whereas exporting to
            upper-middle-income countries is found to have a negative
            relationship with female employment.