rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Effects of income inequality on
            aggregate output
This paper estimates the effect of
            income inequality on real gross domestic product per capita
            using a panel of 104 countries during the period 1970–2010.
            The empirical analysis addresses endogeneity issues by using
            instrumental variables estimation and controlling for
            country and time fixed effects. The analysis finds that, on
            average, income inequality has a significant negative effect
            on transitional gross domestic product per capita growth and
            the long-run level of gross domestic product per capita.
            However, the impact varies by the level of economic
            development, so much so that in poor countries income
            inequality has a significant positive effect on gross
            domestic product per capita.
How costly are labor gender gaps
            estimates for the Balkans and Turkey
In this paper, survey data are used to
            document the presence of gender gaps in self-employment,
            employership, and labor force participation in seven Balkan
            countries and Turkey. The paper examines the quantitative
            effects of the gender gaps on aggregate productivity and
            income per capita in these countries. In the model used to
            carry out this calculation, agents choose between being
            workers, self-employed, or employers, and women face several
            restrictions in the labor market. The data display very
            large gaps in labor force participation and in the
            percentage of employers and self-employed in the labor
            force. In almost all cases, these gaps reveal a clear
            underrepresentation of women. The calculations show that, on
            average, the loss associated with these gaps is about 17
            percent of income per capita. One-third of this loss is due
            to distortions in the choice of occupations between men and
            women. The remaining two-thirds corresponds to the costs
            associated with gaps in labor force participation. The
            dimensions of these gender gaps and their associated costs
            vary considerably across age groups, with the age bracket
            36–50 years being responsible for most of the losses.
Placing Bank supervision in the
            Central Bank : implications for financial stability based on
            evidence from the global crisis
Although keeping bank supervision
            independent from macroprudential supervision may ensure more
            checks and balances, placing bank supervision in the central
            bank could exploit synergies with macroprudential
            supervision. This paper studies whether placing
            microprudential supervision of banks, typically the systemic
            part of the financial system, under the same roof as
            financial stability policy, typically entrusted to the
            central bank, can improve financial stability. Specifically,
            the paper analyzes whether having bank supervision in the
            central bank mitigated the likelihood of banking crises
            during 2007–12. The analysis conditions on crisis indicators
            commonly found in the early-warning models of banking
            crises, the quality of microprudential supervision, and the
            quality of macroprudential supervision. The authors find
            that countries with deeper financial markets and those
            undergoing rapid financial deepening can better foster
            financial stability when they put bank supervision in the
            central bank.
Inclusive economic growth in
            America’s cities : what’s the playbook and the score
This paper defines economic inclusion as
            the ability of all people, including the disadvantaged, to
            share in economic gains, that is, the conditions that allow
            for broadly shared prosperity. Beyond the “right” to access
            consumption in cities, and beyond relatively standardized
            safety net policies that support economic security,
            inclusion demands intentional, flexible, context-appropriate
            strategies aimed at shifting the dynamics of local land and
            labor markets, public education, and other institutions. The
            paper analyzes the varied contexts for designing and
            supporting such strategies in a rapidly changing society,
            where urban regions have long been critical to incorporating
            a broad cross-section of people, including immigrant
            newcomers. Four dimensions are particularly crucial: an
            urban area’s level of economic growth, the quality of its
            jobs, its demographic profile, and its geography of
            opportunity (degree and form of spatial inequality).
            Economic inclusion is particularly urgent in America’s
            strongest local markets, which are pricing out the
            lowest-wage workers and showing a disturbing tendency to
            import rather than grow the talent needed for the emerging,
            innovation-driven economy. But weak-market regions face
            important challenges—and a range of options for leveraging
            demographic and other changes—as well. And for now, in all
            types of cities, innovative and promising strategies remain
            small in scale, in part because they are competing for
            support with entrenched, underperforming systems.
Cooperative behavior and common pool
            resources : experimental evidence from community forest user
            groups in Nepal
This paper examines whether cooperative
            behavior by respondents measured as contributions in a
            one-shot public goods game correlates with reported
            pro-forest collective action behaviors. All the outcomes
            analyzed are costly in terms of time, land, or money. The
            study finds significant evidence that more cooperative
            individuals (or those who believe their group members will
            cooperate) engage in collective action behaviors that
            support common forests, once the analysis is adjusted for
            demographic factors, wealth, and location. Those who
            contribute more in the public goods experiment are found to
            be more likely to have planted trees in community forests
            during the previous month and to have invested in biogas.
            They also have planted more trees on their own farms and
            spent more time monitoring community forests. As cooperation
            appears to be highly conditional on beliefs about others’
            cooperation, these results suggest that policies to support
            cooperation and strengthen local governance could be
            important for collective action and economic outcomes
            associated with forest resources. As forest management and
            quality in developing countries is particularly important
            for climate change policy, these results suggest that
            international efforts such as the United Nations
            Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from
            Deforestation and Forest Degradation should pay particular
            attention to supporting governance and cooperation at the
            local level.
The effect of nonbinding agreements
            on cooperation among forest user groups in Nepal and Ethiopia
This paper summarizes the results from
            public goods experiments investigating the effect of
            nonbinding agreements on cooperation. Unlike previous
            studies, this experimental study was conducted among members
            of forest user groups in Ethiopia and Nepal with long
            histories of social interdependence. These countries are
            also characterized by a high degree of collectivism.
            Overall, the results show a weak effect of nonbinding
            agreements on cooperation in the two locations. The main
            reason for this is that the cooperation level is relatively
            high even without an agreement and only a small proportion
            of subjects change their behavior when the agreement option
            is introduced. Nonetheless, the research indicates that the
            willingness to enter an agreement varies between subjects
            and strongly correlates with their cooperativeness.
Does collective action sequester
            carbon the case of the Nepal community forestry program
This paper estimate the effects of
            collective action in Nepal’s community forests on four
            ecological measures of forest quality. Forest user group
            collective action is identified through membership in the
            Nepal Community Forestry Programme, pending membership in
            the program, and existence of a forest user group whose
            leaders can identify the year the group was formed. This
            last, broad category is important, because many community
            forest user groups outside the program show significant
            evidence of important collective action. The study finds
            that presumed open access forests have only 21 to 57 percent
            of the carbon of forests governed under collective action.
            In several models, program forests sequester more carbon
            than communities outside the program. This implies that
            paying new program groups for carbon sequestration credits
            under the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing
            Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing
            may be especially appropriate. However, marginal carbon
            sequestration effects of program participation are smaller
            and less consistent than those from two broader measures of
            collective action. The main finding is that within the
            existing institutional environment, collective action
            broadly defined has very important, positive, and large
            effects on carbon stocks and, in some models, on other
            aspects of forest quality.
Cross-border electricity cooperation
            in South Asia
South Asian countries, facing challenges
            in efficiently meeting growing electricity demand, can
            benefit from increased cross-border electricity cooperation
            and trade by harnessing complementarities in electricity
            demand patterns, diversity in resource endowments for power
            generation, and gains from larger market access. The region
            has witnessed slow progress in expanding regional
            electricity cooperation and trade, and undertaking needed
            domestic sector reforms. Although bilateral electricity
            sector cooperation in the region is increasing, broader
            regional cooperation and trade initiatives have lagged in
            the face of regional barriers and domestic sector
            inefficiencies. Deeper electricity market reforms are not a
            necessity for further development of cross-border
            electricity trade, but limited progress in overcoming
            regional and domestic barriers will limit the scope of the
            regional market and the benefits it can provide.
Latent trade diversification and its
            relevance for macroeconomic stability
Traditional measures of trade
            diversification only take into account contemporaneous
            export baskets. These measures fail to capture a country’s
            ability to respond to shocks by allocating factors of
            production into activities for which it has already paid the
            fixed costs associated with exporting. This paper corrects
            for the shortcoming of traditional measures of
            diversification by introducing a novel measure of trade
            diversification—latent diversification—and proposes a proxy
            to measure latent diversification, which is calculated by
            taking into account the entire history of a country’s
            exports. The paper shows that the observed gaps between
            traditional measures of diversification and the proposed
            proxy of latent diversification are sizeable; countries hold
            latent export baskets that are, on average, three times as
            large as their average contemporaneous export basket, and
            these gaps are largest for poor and small countries.
            Moreover, latent diversification is an important determinant
            of volatility—more diversified latent export baskets are
            associated with lower terms of trade volatility and,
            subsequently, lower GDP per capita volatility, even after
            controlling for the degree of contemporaneous export
            diversification and other trade and country characteristics.
            The latter result, together with the disproportionately
            large latent baskets relative to contemporaneous baskets
            observed in poor and small countries, suggests that latent
            diversification is an important vehicle toward stability in
            countries that face barriers in building diversified
            contemporaneous export baskets.
Demography, urbanization and
            development : rural push, urban pull and... urban push
Developing countries have urbanized
            rapidly since 1950. To explain urbanization, standard models
            emphasize rural-urban migration, focusing on rural push
            factors (agricultural modernization and rural poverty) and
            urban pull factors (industrialization and urban-biased
            policies). Using new historical data on urban birth and
            death rates for seven countries from Industrial Europe
            (1800–1910) and thirty-five developing countries
            (1960–2010), this paper argues that a non-negligible part of
            developing countries’ rapid urban growth and urbanization
            may also be linked to demographic factors, such as rapid
            internal urban population growth, or an urban push. High
            urban natural increase in today’s developing countries
            follows from lower urban mortality, relative to Industrial
            Europe, where higher urban deaths offset urban births. This
            compounds the effects of migration and displays strong
            associations with urban congestion, providing additional
            insight into the phenomenon of urbanization without growth.
Quality and accountability in
            healthcare delivery : audit evidence from primary care
            providers in India
This paper presents direct evidence on
            the quality of health care in low-income settings using a
            unique and original set of audit studies, where standardized
            patients were presented to a nearly representative sample of
            rural public and private primary care providers in the
            Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Three main findings are
            reported. First, private providers are mostly unqualified,
            but they spent more time with patients and completed more
            items on a checklist of essential history and examination
            items than public providers, while being no different in
            their diagnostic and treatment accuracy. Second, the private
            practices of qualified public sector doctors were identified
            and the same doctors exerted higher effort and were more
            likely to provide correct treatment in their private
            practices. Third, there is a strong positive correlation
            between provider effort and prices charged in the private
            sector, whereas there is no correlation between effort and
            wages in the public sector. The results suggest that
            market-based accountability in the unregulated private
            sector may be providing better incentives for provider
            effort than administrative accountability in the public
            sector in this setting. While the overall quality of care is
            low both sectors, the differences in provider effort may
            partly explain the dominant market share of fee-charging
            private providers even in the presence of a system of free
            public healthcare.
When elites meet : decentralization,
            power-sharing, and public goods provision in post-conflict
            Sierra Leone
Over the past decade, decentralization
            of fiscal and policy-making authority has become a
            cornerstone of development organizations’ recommendations
            for good governance. Yet the institutional design of
            multilayered government can create tensions as new elites
            attempt to fill governing spaces long occupied by
            traditional patrons. This paper uses the case of
            post-conflict Sierra Leone to explore the power-sharing
            dynamics between traditional hereditary chiefs and newly
            elected community councilors, and how these dynamics affect
            the provision of local public goods. The paper uses data on
            several measures of local service provision and finds that
            councilor/chief relationships defined by competition are
            associated with higher levels of public goods provision as
            well as greater improvements in these goods between council
            areas over time. Relationships defined by frequent contact
            in the absence of disputes as well as higher frequencies of
            familial ties between the two sets of actors are associated
            with worse local development outcomes. This evidence
            suggests that greater competition between elite groups is
            beneficial for local development, whereas collusion or
            cooption between old and new elites harms the provision of
            local public goods.
Political connections and tariff
            evasion : evidence from Tunisia
Are politically connected firms more
            likely to evade taxes? This paper presents evidence
            suggesting firms owned by President Ben Ali and his family
            were more prone to evade import tariffs. During Ben Ali’s
            reign, evasion gaps, defined as the difference between the
            value of exports to Tunisia reported by partner countries
            and the value of imports reported at Tunisian customs, were
            correlated with the import share of connected firms. This
            association was especially strong for goods subject to high
            tariffs, and driven by underreporting of unit prices, which
            diminished after the revolution. Consistent with these
            product-level patterns, unit prices reported by connected
            firms were lower than those reported by other firms, and
            declined faster with tariffs than those of other firms.
            Moreover, privatization to the Ben Ali family was associated
            with a reduction in reported unit prices, whereas
            privatization per se was not.
The consumption, income, and wealth
            of the poorest: cross-sectional facts of rural and urban
            Sub-Saharan Africa for macroeconomists
This paper provides new empirical
            insights on the joint distribution of consumption, income,
            and wealth in three of the poorest countries in the world —
            Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda — all located in Sub-Saharan
            Africa (SSA). The first finding is that while income
            inequality is similar to that of the United States (US),
            wealth inequality is barely one-third that of the US.
            Similarly, while the top of the income distribution (1 and
            10 percent) earns a similar share of total income in SSA as
            in the US, the share of total wealth accumulated by the
            income-rich in SSA is one-fifth of its US counterpart. The
            main contributions of the paper are to document: (i) this
            dwarfed transmission from income to wealth, which suggests
            that SSA households face a larger inability to save and
            accumulate wealth compared with US households; and (ii) a
            lower transmission from income to consumption inequality,
            which suggests the presence of powerful institutions that
            favor consumption insurance to the detriment of saving.
            These features are more relevant for rural areas, which
            represent roughly four-fifths of the total population. The
            paper identifies the few successful pockets of the SSA
            population that are able to accumulate wealth by exploring
            sources of inequality such as age, education, migration,
            borrowing ability, and societal systems.
Small cash rewards for big losers :
            experimental insights into the fight against the obesity epidemic
This paper examines the sustainability
            of weight loss achieved through cash rewards and, for the
            first time, the potential of monetary incentives to prevent
            weight cycling. In a three period randomized controlled
            trial, about 700 obese persons were assigned to two
            treatment groups, which were promised different cash rewards
            contingent on the achievement of an individually assigned
            target weight, and to a control group. Successful
            participants were subsequently allocated to two treatment
            groups offered different monetary incentives for maintaining
            the previously achieved target weight and to a control
            group. This is the first experiment of this kind that finds
            sustainable effects of weight loss rewards on the body
            weight of the obese even 18 months after the rewards were
            removed. Additional incentives to maintain an achieved body
            weight improve the sustainability of weight loss only while
            are in place.
Small cash rewards for big losers :
            experimental insights into the fight against the obesity epidemic
WPS7339 Policy Research Working Paper 7339

# Small Cash Rewards for Big Losers

Experimental Insights into the Fight against the Obesity Epidemic _Boris Augurzky Thomas K. Bauer Arndt R. Reichert Christoph M. Schmidt Harald Tauchmann_ Development Research Group Impact Evaluation Team June 2015