rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The misallocation of pay and
            productivity in the public sector : evidence from the labor
            market for teachers
This paper uses a unique dataset of both
            public and private sector primary school teachers and their
            students to present among the first estimates in a
            low-income country of (a) teacher effectiveness; (b) teacher
            value added (TVA) and its correlates; and (c) the link
            between TVA and teacher wages. Teachers are highly effective
            in our setting: Moving a student from the 5th to the 95th
            percentile in the public school TVA distribution would
            increase mean student test scores by 0.54 standard
            deviations. Although the first two years of experience, as
            well as content knowledge, are associated with TVA, all
            observed teacher characteristics explain no more than 5
            percent of the variation in TVA. Finally, there is no
            correlation between TVA and wages in the public sector
            (although there is in the private sector), and a policy
            change that shifted public hiring from permanent to
            temporary contracts, reducing wages by 35 percent, had no
            adverse impact on TVA, either immediately or after 4 years.
            The study confirms the importance of teachers in low income
            countries, extends previous experimental results on teacher
            contracts to a large-scale policy change, and provides
            striking evidence of significant misallocation between pay
            and productivity in the public sector.
Who serves the poor surveying civil
            servants in the developing world
Who are the civil servants that serve
            poor people in the developing world? This paper uses direct
            surveys of civil servants -- the professional body of
            administrators who manage government policy -- and their
            organizations from Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria,
            Pakistan and the Philippines, to highlight key aspects of
            their characteristics and experience of civil service life.
            Civil servants in the developing world face myriad
            challenges to serving the world's poor, from limited
            facilities to significant political interference in their
            work. There are a number of commonalities across service
            environments, and the paper summarizes these in a series of
            'stylized facts' of the civil service in the
            developing world. At the same time, the particular
            challenges faced by a public official vary substantially
            across and within countries and regions. For example,
            measured management practices differ widely across local
            governments of a single state in Nigeria. Surveys of civil
            servants allow us to document these differences, build
            better models of the public sector, and make more informed
            policy choices.
Industrial policies vs public goods
            under asymmetric information
This paper presents an analytical
            framework that captures the informational problems and
            trade-offs that policy makers face when choosing between
            public goods (for example, infrastructure) and industrial
            policies (for example, firm- or sector-specific subsidies).
            After a discussion of the literature, the paper sets up the
            model economy, consisting of a government and a set of
            heterogeneous firms. It then presents the first-best
            allocation (under full information) of government resources
            among firms. Next, uncertainty is introduced by restricting
            information on firm productivity to be private to the firm.
            The paper develops an optimal contract (which replicates the
            first best), consisting of a tax-based mechanism that
            induces firms to reveal their true productivity. As this
            contract requires high government capacity, other, simpler
            policies are considered. The paper concludes that providing
            public goods is likely to dominate industrial policies under
            most scenarios, especially when government capacity is low.
The influence of non-cognitive
            skills on wages within and between firms : evidence from
            Bangladesh's formal sector
Many employers and employees believe
            that non-cognitive skills are an important contributor to
            labor market success. This study has assessed the empirical
            evidence for such a claim in the case of Bangladesh by
            evaluating unique employer-employee matched labor market
            data. The analysis is based on data collected from 6,981
            workers in 500 formal sector firms in Bangladesh's five
            largest formal economic sectors. Using ordinary least
            squares and firm fixed-effect models, the study assesses
            correlations between wages and the so-called "big
            five" personality traits, and augments the analysis
            with the latent personality scores captured by the Rasch
            model. Comparing the ordinary least squares and fixed-effect
            models reveals statistically significant correlations
            between personality traits and wages, within and across
            firms. The results appear to indicate that non-cognitive
            skills are correlated with a worker's likelihood of
            achieving success in the labor market. Although many of the
            findings are consistent with the literature, the analysis
            reveals specific patterns that appear to be unique to
            Bangladesh, including a positive correlation between
            “emotional stability” and wages and a negative correlation
            between "grit" and wages, especially among
            manufacturing workers. Differences across firms could
            indicate that firms that offer higher wages may tend to
            attract workers with distinct types of non-cognitive skills,
            whereas differences within firms may indicate that
            variations in non-cognitive skills are associated with
            disparities in firm-level wage structures. Correlations
            between wages and personality traits are more prominent
            among large firms than among small or medium-sized firms.
Collecting the dirt on soils :
            advancements in plot-level soil testing and implications for
            agricultural statistics
Much of the current analysis on
            agricultural productivity is hampered by the lack of
            consistent, high quality data on soil health and how it is
            changing under past and current management. Historically,
            plot-level statistics derived from household surveys have
            relied on subjective farmer assessments of soil quality or,
            more recently, publicly available geospatial data. The
            Living Standards Measurement Study of the World Bank
            implemented a methodological study in Ethiopia, which
            resulted in an unprecedented data set encompassing a series
            of subjective indicators of soil quality as well as spectral
            soil analysis results on plot-specific soil samples for
            1,677 households. The goals of the study, which was
            completed in partnership with the World Agroforestry Centre
            and the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia, were
            twofold: (1) evaluate the feasibility of integrating a soil
            survey into household socioeconomic data collection
            operations, and (2) evaluate local knowledge of farmers in
            assessing their soil quality.  Although a costlier method
            than subjective assessment, the integration of spectral soil
            analysis in household surveys has potential for scale-up. In
            this study, the first large scale study of its kind,
            enumerators spent approximately 40 minutes per plot
            collecting soil samples, not a particularly prohibitive
            figure given the proper timeline and budget. The correlation
            between subjective indicators of soil quality and key soil
            properties, such as organic carbon, is weak at best.
            Evidence suggests that farmers are better able to
            distinguish between soil qualities in areas with greater
            variation in soil properties. Descriptive analysis shows
            that geospatial data, while positively correlated with
            laboratory results and offering significant improvements
            over subject assessment, fail to capture the level of
            variation observed on the ground. The results of this study
            give promise that soil spectroscopy could be introduced into
            household panel surveys in smallholder agricultural
            contexts, such as Ethiopia, as a rapid and cost-effective
            soil analysis technique with valuable outcomes. Reductions
            in uncertainties in assessing soil quality and, hence,
            improvements in smallholder agricultural statistics, enable
            better decision-making.
Compensation, diversity and
            inclusion at the World Bank Group
This paper examines salary gaps by
            gender and nationality at the World Bank Group between 1987
            and 2015 using a unique panel of all employees over this
            period. The paper develops and implements a dynamic
            simulation approach that models existing gaps as arising
            from differences in job composition at entry, entry
            salaries, salary growth and attrition. There are three main
            findings. First, 76 percent of the $27,400 salary gap across
            the average male and female staff at the World Bank Group
            can be attributed to composition effects, whereby men
            entered the World Bank Group at higher paid positions,
            particularly in the earlier half of the sample. Second,
            salary gaps 15 years after joining the World Bank Group can
            favor either men or women depending on their entry position.
            Third, for the most common entry-level professional position
            (known as Grade GF at the World Bank Group) there is a
            gender gap of 3.5 percent in favor of males 15 years after
            entry. The majority of this gap (84 percent) is due to
            differences in salary growth rather than differences in
            entry salaries or attrition. The pattern of these gaps is
            similar for staff from different nationalities. The dynamic
            decomposition method developed here thus identifies specific
            areas of concern and can be widely applied to the analysis
            of salary gaps within firms.
To sew or not to sew assessing the
            welfare effects of the garment industry in Cambodia
This paper uses the 2011 Cambodia
            Socio-Economic Survey to analyze the relationship between
            participation in the garment industry and household welfare.
            The analysis relies on propensity score matching estimators
            to investigate whether households that have at least one
            member employed in the textile and apparel sector are better
            off than those who do not participate in the garment
            industry, in terms of several monetary and non-monetary
            welfare indicators. The findings show that garment
            households are less likely to experience self-reported food
            insufficiency, and their children are more likely to be
            enrolled in school. Yet, the positive effect of the
            treatment is restricted to the bottom 40 percent of the
            consumption distribution, possibly due to the nature of
            garment jobs, and the fact that they represent an attractive
            alternative for the poorest households but not necessarily
            for the better-off. Using instrumental-variables, the
            analysis also shows that remittances originating from the
            textile and apparel sector relax household budget
            constraints, increasing expenditures in education, health,
            and investments in agricultural activities.
The entry of randomized assignment
            into the social sciences
Although the concept of randomized
            assignment to control for extraneous factors reaches back
            hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have
            been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout
            the 19th century, there was primarily a growing awareness of
            the need for careful comparison groups, albeit often without
            the realization that randomization could be a particularly
            clean method to achieve that goal. In the second and more
            crucial phase of this history, four separate but related
            disciplines introduced randomized control trials within a
            few years of one another in the 1920s: agricultural science,
            clinical medicine, educational psychology, and social policy
            (specifically political science). Randomized control trials
            brought more rigor to fields that were in the process of
            expanding their purviews and focusing more on causal
            relationships. In the third phase, the 1950s through the
            1970s saw a surge of interest in more applied randomized
            experiments in economics and elsewhere, in the lab and
            especially in the field.
Effect of stress on later-life
            health : evidence from the Vietnam war draft
A substantial literature has examined
            the impact of stress during the early stages of life on
            later-life health. This paper contributes to that literature
            by examining the later-life health impact of stress during
            adolescence and early adulthood, using a novel proxy for
            stress: risk of military induction in the United States
            during the Vietnam War. The paper estimates that a 10
            percentage point (2 standard deviation) increase in
            induction risk in young adulthood is associated with a 1.5
            percentage point (8 percent) increase in the probability of
            being obese, and a 1 percentage point (10 percent) increase
            in the probability of being in fair or poor health later in
            life. These findings do not appear to be due to cohort
            effects; the associations exist only for men who did not
            serve in the war, and are not present for women or men who
            did serve. These findings add to the evidence on the lasting
            consequences of stress, and indicate that induction risk
            during the Vietnam War may, in certain contexts, be an
            invalid instrument for education or marriage, because it
            appears to have a direct impact on health.
Status goods : experimental evidence
            from platinum credit cards
This paper provides novel evidence on
            status goods, using a series of field experiments with an
            Indonesian bank that markets platinum credit cards to
            high-income customers. In a first experiment, the paper
            shows that demand for the platinum card greatly exceeds
            demand for a nondescript control product with identical
            benefits, suggesting demand for the pure status aspect of
            the card. Transaction data reveal that platinum cards are
            more likely to be used in social contexts, implying social
            image motivations. Combining price variation with
            information on the use of the card sheds light on the
            magnitude of the demand for social status. A second
            experiment provides evidence of positional externalities
            from the consumption of these status goods. The final
            experiment shows that increasing self-esteem causally
            reduces demand for status goods. This suggests that part of
            the demand for status is psychological in nature, and that
            social image is a substitute for self-image.
The effects of in-kind demand-side
            conditional transfers for improving uptake of maternal and
            child health services in Rwanda
To diagnose and treat preventable
            threats to maternal and neonatal health in Sub-Saharan
            Africa, a policy focus has been put on increasing coverage
            rates of targeted health services. Exploiting an
            experimental design, this study evaluates the impacts of an
            in-kind conditional transfer intervention in Rwanda that
            endowed women with gifts for receiving timely antenatal and
            postnatal care, as well as for delivering in health
            facilities. The analysis finds that although health centers
            experienced frequent stock outs of the gifts, the rate of
            women who initiated antenatal care within the first four
            months of their pregnancy increased by 7.7 percent, and that
            of women who received postnatal care in the 10 days
            following delivery increased by 8.6 percent. No impact was
            found on the rate of in-facility deliveries, which
            independently sharply increased during the years of the
            implementation of the program.
Why do some oil-rich countries
            perform better than others
Progress in child mortality reduction
            and education attainment varies widely among oil-rich
            countries. This paper investigates the causes of this
            variation using an empirical model that departs from the
            available literature in allowing for explicit measurement of
            the impact of initial levels of child mortality and
            education attainment. The results show that the following
            four variables are statistically significant and robust
            across various specifications: public spending on health and
            education, economic growth rates, caloric sufficiency, and
            initial levels of child mortality and education attainment.
            Further analysis was conducted to determine the economic
            significance of these factors by examining the contribution
            of each to the fitted growth rates (as a deviation from the
            sample mean) of child mortality and secondary school
            enrollment for 14 oil-rich developing countries. The
            analysis reveals some interesting patterns. First, initial
            conditions dominate the results for education attainment:
            the initial level of secondary school enrollment in 1980 is
            the dominant factor in explaining subsequent improvements in
            10 of the 14 oil-rich developing countries for which
            calculations could be performed. Second, policy factors
            worked in different ways in different countries. A high
            degree of caloric sufficiency enabled countries in the
            Middle East and North Africa to reduce child mortality
            faster, while low levels of caloric sufficiency prevented
            African oil-rich countries, such as Angola and the Republic
            of Congo, from making progress. Third, levels of public
            spending were not economically critical for gains in school
            enrollment, although they were important in a few country
            cases for improvements in child mortality rates.
Elections and embezzlement :
            experimental evidence from Burkina Faso
Can democratic elections reduce rent
            extraction by public decision makers? Existing research
            suggests that reelection incentives can reduce the
            embezzlement of public funds. This paper examines three
            additional mechanisms through which democratic elections
            could have an impact on embezzlement, even in the absence of
            reelection incentives: (1) electoral selection effects, (2)
            social norms and norm enforcement, and (3) citizens'
            trust in decision makers. Evidence from an experiment with
            472 groups of citizens in rural Burkina Faso suggests that
            electoral selection favors benevolent candidates.
            Furthermore, elections increase citizens' willingness
            to punish corrupt decision makers, even if their ability to
            do so remains unchanged. However, these beneficial effects
            of elections are offset by an unexpected adverse effect:
            elections cause citizens to trust decision makers more than
            they should be trusted. These findings have important
            implications for the role of information in electoral democracy.
The rise of the middle class and
            economic growth in ASEAN
This paper presents estimates of the
            relationship between the share of income accruing to the
            middle class and gross domestic product per capita of
            economies from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
            The increase in gross domestic product per capita that these
            economies experienced during 1970–2010 significantly
            contributed to a higher share of income accruing to the
            middle class. The impact of the rise of the middle class on
            economic growth depends on the countries' initial level
            of gross domestic product per capita. In the majority of
            these countries, a rise of the middle class that is
            unrelated to gross domestic product per capita growth would
            have had a significant negative effect on economic growth,
            based on the values of the countries' gross domestic
            product per capita in 1970. In contrast, for recent values
            of gross domestic product per capita, a rise of the middle
            class would positively contribute to growth in gross
            domestic product per capita. The paper shows that human
            capital accumulation is an important channel through which a
            rise of the middle class affects economic growth.
Fuel efficiency versus fuel
            substitution in the transport sector : an econometric analysis
The transport sector offers limited
            options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as compared with
            other sectors, such as power generation and industrial
            sectors. To understand the potential reduction of energy
            consumption and associated emissions through fuel
            substitution or transportation service demand reduction,
            this study estimates own- and cross-price elasticities of
            various fuels used for transportation. The analysis shows,
            like many previous studies, that an increase in fuel prices
            would not have a large effect on transport sector carbon
            dioxide emissions, due to limited substitution possibilities
            among fuels for transportation. The study also finds that
            price-induced changes that lead to an increase in the rate
            of adoption of fuel-efficient vehicles would be more
            effective than a policy to cause fuel substitution.