rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Competition in Kenyan markets and
            its impact on income and poverty : a case study on sugar and maize
This paper investigates the link between
            competitive, well-functioning food markets and consumer
            welfare. The paper explores two key food markets in Kenya --
            sugar and maize -- and argues that a variety of factors
            conspire to distort market prices upward. Distortionary
            factors include import tariff policy, nontariff barriers,
            potential anticompetitive conduct by firms, and direct state
            intervention in markets. Changes in sugar and maize prices
            are shown to have significant welfare effects on consumers.
            Equivalent income effects are estimated using the most
            recent available representative household survey data -- the
            Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey 2005/06.  The paper
            shows that relaxing trade barriers to allow sugar prices to
            fall by 20 percent could reduce poverty by 1.5 percent.
            Similarly, adjusting government interventions in the maize
            market, which have been shown to inflate maize prices by 20
            percent on average, could reduce poverty by 1.8 percent. The
            magnitude of the estimated income effects may vary based on
            updated household-level consumption data, assumptions
            regarding demand elasticities, and estimates of import
            parity prices for these staples. However, in all the
            scenarios, more competitive prices have a larger average
            effect on the poorest households in urban and rural areas,
            supporting the relevance of effective competition policies
            for poverty reduction strategies.
Gone with the storm: rainfall shocks
            and household well-being in Guatemala
This paper investigates the causal
            consequences of Tropical Storm Agatha (2010) -- the
            strongest tropical storm ever to strike Guatemala since
            rainfall records have been kept -- on household welfare. The
            analysis reveals substantial negative effects, particularly
            among urban households. Per capita consumption fell by 12.6
            percent, raising poverty by 5.5 percentage points (an
            increase of 18 percent). The negative effects of the shock
            span other areas of human welfare. Households cut back on
            food consumption (10 percent or 43 to 108 fewer calories per
            person per day) and reduced expenditures on basic durables.
            These effects are related to a drop in income per capita (10
            percent), mostly among salaried workers. Adults coped with
            the shock by increasing their labor supply (on the intensive
            margin) and simultaneously relying on the labor supply of
            their children and withdrawing them from school. Impact
            heterogeneity is associated with the intensity of the shock,
            food price inflation, and the timing of Agatha with respect
            to the harvest cycle of the main crops. The results are
            robust to placebo treatments, household migration, issues of
            measurement error, and different samples. The negative
            effects of the storm partly explain the increase in poverty
            seen in urban Guatemala between 2006 and 2011, which
            national authorities and analysts previously attributed
            solely to the collateral effects of the global financial crisis.
Tackling social exclusion : evidence
            from Chile
This paper studies an innovative welfare
            program in Chile that combines a period of frequent home
            visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed
            access to social services. Program impacts are identified
            using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact
            that program eligibility is a discontinuous function of an
            index of family income and assets. The analysis finds strong
            and lasting impacts of the program on the take-up of
            subsidies and employment services. These impacts are
            concentrated among families who had little access to the
            welfare system prior to the intervention.
Love, money, and old age support :
            does parental matchmaking matter
Parental involvement in matchmaking may
            distort the choice of spouse because parents are willing to
            substitute love for market and household production, which
            are more sharable between parents and their children. This
            paper finds supportive evidence in a survey of Chinese
            couples. In both rural and urban areas, parent matchmaking
            is associated with less marital harmony between the couple,
            more submissive wives, and a stronger belief in old age
            support for the son. In contrast, its association with
            couple income differs by rural and urban regions, perhaps
            because of differences in earning opportunities and in the
            enforcement of the one-child policy. Moreover, parent
            matchmaking is associated with more children for the couple
            and lower schooling for wives only in rural areas. Thus, in
            places with a stronger need for old age support, parents
            tend to be involved in matchmaking and use it to select
            submissive daughters-in-law to ensure old age support. The
            results render support to Becker, Murphy and Spenckuch
            (2015), who imply that parents would meddle with
            children's preferences to ensure their commitment to
            providing old age support.
The changing patterns of financial
            integration in Latin America
This paper describes how Latin America
            and the Caribbean has been integrating financially with
            countries in the North and South since the 2000s. The paper
            shows that the region is increasingly more connected with
            the rest of the world, even relative to gross domestic
            product. The region's connections with South countries
            have been growing faster than with North countries,
            especially during the second half of the 2000s.
            Nevertheless, North countries continue to be the
            region's principal source and receiver of flows. The
            changes reflect significant increases in portfolio
            investments, syndicated loans, and mergers and acquisitions.
            Growth of greenfield investments has been more subdued after
            the initial high level. Greenfield investments in the region
            have been in sectors in which the source country has a
            comparative advantage, not where the receiver country has an
            advantage. Mergers and acquisitions have been in sectors in
            which the receiver country has a comparative advantage.
Sex-selective abortions, fertility,
            and birth spacing
Previous research on sex-selective
            abortions has ignored the interactions between fertility,
            birth spacing, and sex selection, despite both fertility and
            birth spacing being important considerations for parents
            when deciding on the use of sex selection. This paper
            presents a novel approach that jointly estimates the
            determinants of sex-selective abortions, fertility, and
            birth spacing, using data on Hindu women from India's
            National Family and Health Surveys. Women with eight or more
            years of education in urban and rural areas are the main
            users of sex-selective abortions and they also have the
            lowest fertility. Predicted lifetime fertility for these
            women declined 11 percent between the 1985-1994 and
            1995-2006 periods, which correspond to the periods of time
            before and after sex selection became illegal. Fertility is
            now around replacement level. This decrease in fertility has
            been accompanied by a 6 percent increase in the predicted
            number of abortions during the childbearing years between
            the two periods, and sex selection is increasingly used for
            earlier parities. Hence, the legal steps taken to combat sex
            selection have been unable to reverse its use. Women with
            fewer than eight years of education have substantially
            higher fertility and do not appear to use sex selection.
The internet as a general-purpose
            technology : firm-level evidence from around the world
This paper uses firm-level data to
            assess whether telecommunication services are
            general-purpose technologies (technologies that benefit a
            large segment of the economy and have long-lasting effect).
            It finds that only Internet services are so: firm growth and
            productivity are much higher when Internet access is greater
            and when firms use the Internet more intensively; and
            Internet access benefits firms in high- and low-tech
            industries, firms of all sizes, and exporter and
            non-exporter firms. Small firms appear to benefit more from
            the Internet than large firms do. In contrast, fixed-line
            and cellular services are not robustly linked to firm performance.
Empowering cities : good for growth
            evidence from China
This paper utilizes a countrywide,
            county-to-city upgrade in the 1990s to identify whether
            extending the powers of urban local governments leads to
            better firm outcomes. The paper hypothesizes that since
            local leaders in newly-promoted cities have an incentive to
            utilize their new administrative remit to maximize gross
            domestic product and employment growth, there should be
            improvements in economic outcomes. The analysis finds that
            aggregate firm-level outcomes do not necessarily improve
            after county-to-city graduation. However, it does find that
            state-owned enterprises perform better post-graduation, with
            increased access to credit through state-owned banks as a
            possible explanation for the improvement in performance. The
            most important finding is that newly-promoted cities with
            high capacity generally produce better aggregate firm
            outcomes compared with newly-promoted cities with low
            capacity. The conclusions are twofold. First, in terms of
            access to credit, the paper provides evidence that relaxing
            credit constraints for firms could lead to large increases
            in firm operation and employment. Second, increasing local
            government's administrative remit is not enough to lead
            to better firm and economic outcomes; local capacity is of
            paramount importance.
The distributional impact of fiscal
            policy in South Africa
This paper uses the 2010/11 Income and
            Expenditure Survey for South Africa to analyze the
            progressivity of the main tax and social spending programs
            and quantify their impact on poverty and inequality. The
            paper also assesses the redistributive effectiveness of
            fiscal interventions given the resources used. Because it
            applies the Commitment to Equity methodology, the results
            for South Africa can be compared with other middle-income
            countries for which the framework has also been applied. The
            main results are twofold. First, the burden of taxes --
            namely the personal income tax, the value added tax, excises
            on alcohol and tobacco, and the fuel levy -- falls on the
            richest in South Africa and social spending results in
            sizable increases in the incomes of the poor. In other
            words, for the components examined, the tax and social
            spending system is overall progressive. Second, for these
            elements, fiscal policy in South Africa achieves appreciable
            reductions in income inequality and poverty. Moreover, these
            reductions are the largest achieved in the emerging market
            countries that have so far been included in the Commitment
            to Equity project. Although fiscal policy is equalizing and
            poverty-reducing, the levels of inequality and poverty that
            remain still rank among the highest in middle-income
            countries. Looking ahead, as South Africa grapples with slow
            economic growth, a high fiscal deficit, and a rising debt
            burden, addressing the twin challenges of high inequality
            and poverty will require not only much improved quality of
            public services, but also higher and more inclusive economic growth.
Debiasing on a roll: changing
            gambling behavior through experiential learning
This paper tests experiential learning
            as a debiasing tool against gambling and lottery behavior in
            South Africa. The study implemented a simple, interactive
            dice game that simulates worsening winning odds of rolling
            sixes as more dice are added to the game. The analysis
            exploits two levels of exogenous variation, first from
            random assignment into the debiasing game, and second from
            the number of rolls it takes to obtain the sixes. Treated
            individuals who needed above-median number of rolls to
            obtain simultaneous sixes are significantly less likely than
            the control group to gamble or play the lottery in the
            following year. The converse is true for individuals who
            needed below-median number of rolls, suggesting a perverse
            treatment effect among this group. The analysis also finds
            suggestive evidence that the debiasing affected the
            sensitivity to varying winning odds. Changes in
            entertainment utility or risk preferences cannot explain
            these findings, rather the results are consistent with
            changes in risk beliefs.
Orphans and Ebola : estimating the
            secondary impact of a public health crisis
The 2014 Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in
            West Africa is the largest to date by far. Ebola Virus
            Disease causes disproportionate mortality among the
            working-age population, resulting in far more mortality for
            parents of young children than other health crises. This
            paper combines data on the age distribution of current and
            projected mortality from Ebola with the fertility
            distribution of adults in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone,
            to estimate the likely impact of the epidemic on the number
            of orphans in these three countries. Using the latest
            mortality estimates (from February 11, 2015), it is
            estimated that more than 9,600 children have lost one or
            both parents to Ebola Virus Disease. The absolute numbers of
            orphans created by the Ebola epidemic are significant, but
            represent a small fraction (1.4 percent) of the existing
            orphan burden in the affected countries. Ebola is unlikely
            to increase the numbers of orphans beyond extended family
            networks' capacities to absorb them. Nonetheless, the
            pressures of caring for increased numbers of orphans may
            result in lower quality of care. These estimates should be
            used to guide policy to support family networks to improve
            the capacity to provide high quality care to orphans.
Behavioral economics and social
            exclusion : can interventions overcome prejudice
Behavioral economics recognizes that
            mental models -- intuitive sets of ideas about how things
            work -- can bias an individual's perceptions of himself
            and the world. By representing an ascriptive category of
            people as unworthy, a mental model can foster unjust social
            exclusion of, for example, a race, gender, caste, or class.
            Since the representation is a social construction,
            shouldn't society be able to control it? But how? This
            paper considers three interventions that have had some
            success in developing countries: (1) Group deliberation in
            Senegal challenged the traditional mental model of female
            genital cutting and contributed to the abandonment of the
            practice; (2) political reservations for women and low
            castes in India improved the way men perceived women, the
            way parents perceived their daughters, and the way women
            perceived themselves, but have not generally had positive
            effects on the low castes; and (3) reductions in the
            salience of identity closed performance gaps between
            dominant and stigmatized groups in experiments in India and
            China. Spoiled collective identities need to be changed or
            made less prominent in order to overcome social exclusion.
Drinking water salinity and infant
            mortality in coastal Bangladesh
Bangladesh, with two-thirds of its land
            area less than five meters above sea level, is one of the
            most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Low-lying
            coastal districts along the Bay of Bengal are particularly
            vulnerable to sea level rise, tidal flooding, storm surges,
            and climate-induced increases in soil and water salinity.
            This paper investigates the impact of drinking water
            salinity on infant mortality in coastal Bangladesh. It
            focuses on the salinity of drinking water consumed during
            pregnancy, which extensive medical research has linked to
            maternal hypertension, preeclampsia, and post-partum
            morbidity and mortality. The study combines
            spatially-formatted salinity measures for 2001-09 provided
            by Bangladesh with individual and household survey
            information from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health
            Surveys for 2004 and 2007. It uses probit and logit analyses
            to estimate mortality probability for infants less than two
            months old. Controlling for many other determinants of
            infant mortality, the analysis finds high significance for
            salinity exposure during the last month of pregnancy and no
            significance for exposure during the preceding months. The
            estimated impact of salinity on infant mortality is
            comparable in magnitude to the estimated effects of
            traditionally-cited variables such as maternal age and
            education, gender of the household head, household wealth,
            toilet facilities, drinking water sources, and cooking fuels.
Is increasing inorganic fertilizer
            use in Sub-Saharan Africa a profitable proposition evidence
            from Nigeria
Inorganic fertilizer use across
            Sub-Saharan Africa is generally considered to be low. Yet,
            this belief is predicated on the assumption that it is
            profitable to use rates higher than currently observed.
            However, there is little rigorous empirical evidence to
            support this notion. Using a nationally representative panel
            data set, and with due recognition of the role of risk and
            uncertainty, this paper empirically estimates the
            profitability of fertilizer use for maize production in
            Nigeria. The analysis finds that inorganic fertilizer use in
            Nigeria is not as low as conventional wisdom suggests. Low
            marginal physical product and high transportation costs
            significantly reduce the profitability of fertilizer use.
            The paper finds evidence that strategies to reduce
            transportation costs are likely to have a much larger effect
            on the profitability of fertilizer use than fertilizer
            subsidies. Apart from reduced transportation costs, other
            constraints such as timely access to the product;
            availability of complementary inputs such as improved seeds,
            irrigation, and credit; as well as good management practices
            are also necessary for sustained agricultural productivity improvements.
Maize price volatility : does market
            remoteness matter
This paper addresses the role of market
            remoteness in explaining maize price volatility in Burkina
            Faso. A model of price formation is introduced to
            demonstrate formally that transport costs between urban and
            rural markets exacerbate maize price volatility. Empirical
            support is provided to the proposition by exploring an
            unusually rich data set of monthly maize price series across
            28 markets over 2004-13. The methodology relies on an
            autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model to
            investigate the statistical effect of road quality and
            distance from urban consumption centers on maize price
            volatility. The analysis finds that maize price volatility
            is greatest in remote markets. The results also show that
            maize-surplus markets and markets bordering Côte
            d'Ivoire, Ghana and Togo have experienced more volatile
            prices than maize-deficit and non-bordering markets. The
            findings suggest that enhancing road infrastructure would
            strengthen the links between rural markets and major
            consumption centers, thereby also stabilizing maize prices.
What really works to improve
            learning in developing countries an analysis of divergent
            findings in systematic reviews
In the past two years alone, at least
            six systematic reviews or meta-analyses have examined the
            interventions that improve learning outcomes in low- and
            middle-income countries. However, these reviews have
            sometimes reached starkly different conclusions: reviews, in
            turn, recommend information technology, interventions that
            provide information about school quality, or even basic
            infrastructure (such as desks) to achieve the greatest
            improvements in student learning. This paper demonstrates
            that these divergent conclusions are largely driven by
            differences in the samples of research incorporated by each
            review. The top recommendations in a given review are often
            driven by the results of evaluations not included in other
            reviews. Of 227 studies with student learning results, the
            most inclusive review incorporates less than half of the
            total studies. Variance in classification also plays a role.
            Across the reviews, the three classes of programs that are
            recommended with some consistency (albeit under different
            names) are pedagogical interventions (including
            computer-assisted learning) that tailor teaching to student
            skills; repeated teacher training interventions, often
            linked to another pedagogical intervention; and improving
            accountability through contracts or performance incentives,
            at least in certain contexts. Future reviews will be most
            useful if they combine narrative review with meta-analysis,
            conduct more exhaustive searches, and maintain low
            aggregation of intervention categories.