rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Does energy consumption respond to
            price shocks evidence from a regression-discontinuity design
This paper exploits unique features of a
            recently introduced tariff schedule for natural gas in
            Buenos Aires to estimate the short-run impact of price
            shocks on residential energy utilization. The schedule
            induces a nonlinear and non-monotonic relationship between
            households' accumulated consumption and unit prices,
            thus generating exogenous price variation, which is
            exploited in a regression-discontinuity design. The results
            reveal that a price increase causes a prompt and significant
            decline in gas consumption. They also indicate that
            consumers respond more to recent past bills than to expected
            prices, which argues against the assumption that consumers
            have perfect awareness of complex price schedules.
Academic peer effects with different
            group assignment policies : residential tracking versus
            random assignment
This paper studies the relative academic
            performance of students tracked or randomly assigned to
            South African university dormitories. Tracked or streamed
            assignment creates dormitories where all students obtained
            similar scores on high school graduation examinations.
            Random assignment creates dormitories that are approximately
            representative of the population of students. Tracking
            lowers students' mean grades in their first year of
            university and increases the variance or inequality of
            grades. This result is driven by a large negative effect of
            tracking on low-scoring students' grades and a
            near-zero effect on high-scoring students' grades.
            Low-scoring students are more sensitive to changes in their
            peer group composition and their grades suffer if they live
            only with low-scoring peers. In this setting, residential
            tracking has undesirable efficiency (lower mean) and equity
            (higher variance) effects. The result isolates a pure peer
            effect of tracking, whereas classroom tracking studies
            identify a combination of peer effects and differences in
            teacher behavior across tracked and untracked classrooms.
            The negative pure peer effect of residential tracking
            suggests that classroom tracking may also have negative
            effects unless teachers are more effective in homogeneous
            classrooms. Random variation in peer group composition under
            random dormitory assignment also generates peer effects.
            Living with higher-scoring peers increases students'
            grades and the effect is larger for low-scoring students.
            This is consistent with the aggregate effects of tracking
            relative to random assignment. However, using peer effects
            estimated in randomly assigned groups to predict outcomes in
            tracked groups yields unreliable predictions. This
            illustrates a more general risk that peer effects estimated
            under one peer group assignment policy provide limited
            information about how peer effects might work with a
            different peer group assignment policy.
Customs, brokers, and informal
            sectors : a Cameroon case study
Based on extensive interviews with
            informal importers and brokers in Cameroon, this paper
            explains why customs reform aimed at reducing fraud and
            corruption may be difficult to achieve. Informal traders and
            brokers (without licenses) follow various business models
            and practices, which are product-specific. Overall, what
            matters first are customs brokers' practices.
            Information asymmetries mark transactions between brokers
            and importers and are accompanied by misperceptions of the
            costs and risks of informal brokers working among informal
            importers. In a low-governance environment with widespread
            informal practices, blanket policies should be avoided in
            order to discourage activities of unprofessional and
            systematic bribe-taker brokers. It is also essential that
            customs officials disrupt information asymmetries and better
            disseminate information to informal importers on customs
            processes and official costs. Finally, customs should more
            strongly sanction some informal brokers in order to reduce
            collusion with some customs officers.
Impact of intermittent screening and
            treatment for malaria among school children in Kenya : a
            cluster randomized trial
This paper investigates the effects of
            intermittent screening and treatment of malaria on the
            health and education of school children in an area of
            low-to-moderate malaria transmission. A cluster randomized
            trial was implemented with 5,233 children in 101 government
            primary schools on the south coast of Kenya in 2010-12. The
            intervention was delivered to children randomly selected
            from classes 1 and 5 who were followed up twice across 24
            months. Once during each school term, public health workers
            used malaria rapid diagnostic tests to screen the children.
            Children who tested positive were treated with a six-dose
            regimen of artemether-lumefantrine. Given the nature of the
            intervention, the trial was not blinded. The primary
            outcomes were anemia and sustained attention and the
            secondary outcomes were malaria parasitaemia and educational
            achievement. The data were analyzed on an intention-to-treat
            basis. Anemia in this setting in Kenya, intermittent
            screening and treatment, as implemented in this study, is
            not effective in improving the health or education of school
            children. Possible reasons for the absence of an impact are
            the marked geographical heterogeneity in transmission, the
            rapid rate of reinfection following artemether-lumefantrine
            treatment, the variable reliability of malaria rapid
            diagnostic tests, and the relative contribution of malaria
            to the etiology of anemia in this setting.
Wage growth, landholding, and
            mechanization in agriculture : evidence from Indonesia
This paper uses farm panel data from
            Indonesia to examine dynamic patterns of land use, capital
            investments, and wages in agriculture. The empirical
            analysis shows that an increase in real wages has induced
            the substitution of labor by machines among relatively large
            farmers. Large farmers tend to increase the scale of
            operation by renting in more land when real wages increase.
            Machines and land are complementary if the scale of
            operation is greater than a threshold size. In contrast,
            such a dynamic change was not observed among relatively
            small holders, which implies a divergence in the movement of
            the production frontier between Java and off-Java regions
            given that the majority of small farmers are concentrated in Java.
Institutional quality mediates the
            effect of human capital on economic performance
This paper considers the relationship
            between institutional quality, educational outcomes, and
            economic performance. More specifically, it seeks to
            establish the linkages by which government effectiveness
            affects per capita income, via its mediating effect on human
            capital formation. The empirical approach adopts a two-stage
            strategy that estimates national-level educational
            production functions that include government effectiveness
            as a covariate, and then uses these estimates as instruments
            for human capital in cross-country regressions of per capita
            income. The results identify a significant and positive
            effect of human capital on per capita income levels, and
            partially resolves the inconsistency between macro- and
            micro-level studies of the effect of human capital on
            income. The results also remain robust to alternative
            specifications, extension to a panel setting, subsamples of
            the data, and fully endogenous institutions.
The impact of early childhood
            education on early achievement gaps : evidence from the
            Indonesia early childhood education and development (ECED) project
This paper assesses whether the
            Indonesia Early Childhood Education and Development project
            had an impact on early achievement gaps as measured by an
            array of child development outcomes and enrollment. The
            analysis is based on longitudinal data collected in 2009 and
            2010 on approximately 3,000 four-year-old children residing
            in 310 villages located in nine districts across Indonesia.
            The study begins by documenting the intent-to-treat impact
            of the project. It then compares the achievement gaps
            between richer and poorer children living in project
            villages with those of richer and poorer children living in
            non-project villages. There is clear evidence that in
            project villages, the achievement gap between richer and
            poorer children decreased on many dimensions. By contrast,
            in non-project villages, this gap either increased or stayed
            constant. Given Indonesia's interest in increasing
            access to early childhood services for all children, and the
            need to ensure more efficient spending on education, the
            paper discusses how three existing policies and programs
            could be leveraged to ensure that Indonesia's vision
            for holistic, integrated early childhood services becomes a
            reality. The lessons from Indonesia's experience apply
            more broadly to countries seeking to reduce early
            achievement gaps and expand access to pre-primary education.
Reserve requirements in the brave
            new macroprudential world
Using a new, large data set on quarterly
            reserve requirements for the period 1970-2011, this paper
            provides new evidence on the use of reserve requirements as
            a countercyclical macroprudential tool in developing
            countries. The appeal of reserve requirements lies in the
            pro-cyclical behavior of the exchange rate over the business
            cycle in developing countries. This enormously complicates
            the use of interest rates as a countercyclical instrument
            (because of its effect on the exchange rate) and calls for a
            second instrument. The paper suggests that conflicts may
            arise between the microprudential and macroprudential policy stances.
Labor mobility, economic shocks, and
            jobless growth : evidence from panel data in Morocco
During the past 20 years, Morocco has
            implemented a wide range of macroeconomic, social, and labor
            market reforms that have delivered in terms of growth of
            gross domestic product and household welfare. Yet, these
            positive developments are not reflected by the main labor
            market indicators, a phenomenon observed elsewhere in
            developed and developing economies alike and labeled as
            "jobless growth." For the first time for Morocco,
            this paper uses quarterly panel data to investigate the
            question of labor mobility in an effort to determine whether
            people have moved to better sectors and jobs. The results
            point to significant labor mobility between labor statuses
            with quite distinct features across population groups. All
            groups experience some form of labor market mobility every
            quarter and women are as mobile as men. However, the
            transitions that women experience are very different from
            the transitions than men experience and women's
            performance is worse than mens performance in almost all
            aspects of labor mobility.
Financial constraints, working
            capital and the dynamic behavior of the firm
Financial constraints are widespread in
            developing countries, where even short-term credit is
            limited. Finance held by firms as working capital is a
            substantial proportion of sales revenue, yet the role of
            working capital is largely neglected by existing models of
            financial constraints. This paper presents a dynamic model
            of the firm that incorporates working capital by introducing
            a delay between factor payments and the receipt of revenue.
            In contrast with previous models, the working capital model
            predicts that firms under binding constraints will
            substitute between labor and capital in response to demand
            shocks, causing investment to be countercyclical. For firms
            near the margin of being constrained, constraints bind when
            positive production opportunities arise. Output growth is
            therefore constrained in response to positive shocks but not
            to negative shocks. Simulations suggest that models without
            working capital may understate the predicted effects of
            financial constraints on production efficiency, firm profit
            and growth over time. The predictions are tested with the
            Bangladesh Panel Survey data for manufacturing firms.
            Consistent with the theory, there is evidence that
            constraints bind when output price increases, that
            investment by constrained firms is countercyclical, and that
            output response to positive shocks is dampened for firms
            that are sometimes constrained. The results also are
            important for policy. In order to maximize growth, efforts
            to relieve credit constraints should be focused on periods
            when demand shocks are high.
What factors predict how public
            sector projects perform a review of the World Bank's
            public sector management portfolio
This paper uses regression analysis to
            identify which country context, reform content, process, and
            project management variables predict the performance of
            public sector management projects, as measured by the
            Independent Evaluation Group's project outcome ratings.
            The paper draws on data from a large sample of World Bank
            public sector management projects that were approved between
            1990 and 2013. It contributes to an emerging literature that
            uses cross-country regressions to analyze public sector
            management reform patterns. The findings suggest that
            political context factors have a greater impact on the
            performance of public sector management projects than on
            other projects. Specifically, public sector management
            projects perform better in countries with democratic regimes
            than autocratic ones. They fare better in the presence of
            programmatic political parties and in more aid-dependent
            countries. Project managers' subjective risk
            assessments predict performance in public sector management
            operations better than objective risk indicators. These
            findings suggest that the performance of public sector
            management projects would benefit from a better alignment of
            project design with political context and from a more open
            dialogue about risk between task team leaders and management.
The implementation of industrial
            parks : some lessons learned in India
Industrial parks are as popular as they
            are controversial, in India and globally. At their best they
            align infrastructure provision and agglomeration economies
            to jolt industrial growth. More often, they generate
            negative spill-overs, provide handouts, sit empty, or simply
            do not get built. This paper disaggregates how parks are
            built and how they fail. It contextualizes parks in India,
            followed by a thick case study of an innovative scheme that
            appears to buck the trend. This performance is then
            explained by the way in which the scheme's design and
            action fit India's political economy. The paper
            concludes by considering how the analysis and the lessons
            learned might inform the design and implementation of
            industrial park programs and other public interventions, in
            India and elsewhere.
Why are adult women missing son
            preference and maternal survival in India
This paper is the first to show that
            excess mortality among adult women can be partly explained
            by strong preference for male children, the same cultural
            norm widely known to cause excess mortality before birth or
            at young ages. Using pooled individual-level data for India,
            the paper compares the age structure and anemia status of
            women by the sex of their first-born and uncovers several
            new findings. First, the share of living women with a
            first-born girl is a decreasing function of the women's
            age at the time of the survey. Second, while there are no
            systematic differences at the time of birth, women with a
            first-born girl are significantly more likely to develop
            anemia when young (under the age of 30) and these
            differences disappear for older women. Moreover, among those
            in the older age group, they appear to be significantly
            better off in terms of various predetermined
            characteristics. These findings are consistent with a
            selection effect in which maternal and adult mortality is
            higher for women with first-born girls, especially the poor
            and uneducated with limited access to health care and
            prenatal sex diagnostic technologies. To ensure the desired
            sex composition of children, these women resort to a
            fertility behavior medically known to increase their risk of
            death. The observed sex ratios for first births imply that
            2.2-8.4 percent of women with first-born girls are
            'missing' because of son preference between the
            ages of 30 and 49.
The effects of the intensity,
            timing, and persistence of personal history of mobility on
            support for redistribution
This paper examines the association
            between the intensity, timing, and persistence of personal
            history of mobility on individual support for
            redistribution. Using both rounds of the Life in Transition
            Survey, the paper builds measures of downward mobility for
            about 57,000 individuals from 27 countries in Eastern Europe
            and Central Asia. The analysis finds that more intensive,
            recent, and persistent downward mobility increases support
            for redistribution more. A number of extensions and checks
            are done by, among others, taking into account systematic
            bias in perceived mobility experience, considering an
            alternative definition of redistributive preferences, and
            exploring the severity of omitted variable bias problems.
            Overall, the results are robust.
The nexus between gender, collective
            action for public goods, and agriculture : evidence from Malawi
Across the developing world, public
            goods exert significant impacts on the local rural economy
            in general and agricultural productivity and welfare
            outcomes in particular. Economic and social-cultural
            heterogeneity have, however, long been documented as
            detrimental to collective capacity to provide public goods.
            In particular, women are often under-represented in local
            leadership and decision-making processes, as are young
            adults and minority ethnic groups.  While democratic
            principles dictate that broad civic engagement by women and
            other groups could improve the efficiency and effectiveness
            of local governance and increase public goods provision, the
            empirical evidence on these hypotheses is scant. This paper
            develops a theoretical model highlighting the complexity of
            constructing a "fair" schedule of individual
            contributions, given heterogeneity in costs and benefits
            that accrue to people depending, for instance, on their
            gender, age, ethnicity, and education. The model
            demonstrates that representative leadership and broad
            participation in community organizations can mitigate the
            negative impacts of heterogeneity on collective capacity to
            provide public goods. Nationally-representative household
            survey data from Malawi, combined with geospatial and
            administrative information, are used to test this hypothesis
            and estimate the relationship between collective capacity
            for public goods provision and community median estimates of
            maize yields and household consumption expenditures per
            capita. The analysis shows that similarities between the
            leadership and the general population, in terms of gender
            and age, and active participation by women and young adults
            in community groups alleviate the negative effects of
            heterogeneity and increase collective capacity, which in
            turn improves agricultural productivity and welfare.
Fiscal challenges after the global
            financial crisis : a survey of key issues
The global financial crisis and the
            response to it have contributed to a sharp increase in
            public indebtedness in a large number of countries. While
            there have been episodes of high debt in the past, there are
            a number of long-term challenges today that are likely to
            complicate the implementation of sustainable fiscal policies
            in the coming years. Population aging and climate change are
            factors that are likely to contribute to rising fiscal
            pressures and the crisis has highlighted the risks and
            vulnerabilities stemming from reduced fiscal space. This
            paper argues that heightened fiscal challenges can only be
            dealt with successfully by adopting a long-term fiscal
            planning horizon. The paper analyzes a range of available
            policy tools that countries have used in the past to improve
            fiscal management. Particular attention is paid to the role
            of rules-based policies, improvements in the budget process,
            better accounting of long-term liabilities in the government
            budget, the deleterious effects of unproductive
            expenditures, and the painful trade-offs created by the
            crisis and the toolkit at hand to address them.