rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Mobilization Effects of Multilateral
            Development Banks
This study uses loan-level data on
            syndicated lending to a large sample of developing countries
            between 1993 and 2017 to estimate the mobilization effects
            of multilateral development banks (MDBs), that is, their
            ability to crowd-in capital from private creditors.
            Controlling for a large set of fixed effects, the paper
            shows evidence of positive and significant mobilization
            effects of multilateral lending on the size of bank inflows.
            The number of lenders and the average maturity of syndicated
            loans also increase. These effects are present not only on
            impact but last for up to three years and are not offset by
            a decline in bond financing. There is no evidence of
            anticipation effects, and the results are robust to numerous
            tests controlling for the role of confounding factors and
            unobserved heterogeneity. Finally, the results are
            economically sizable, indicating that MDBs can mobilize
            about seven dollars in bank credit over a three-year period
            for each dollar invested.
Benefits and Costs of Debt : The
            Dose Makes the Poison
Government debt has risen substantially
            in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) since
            the global financial crisis. The current environment of low
            global interest rates and weak growth may appear to mitigate
            concerns about elevated debt levels. Considering currently
            subdued investment, additional government borrowing might
            also appear to be an attractive option for financing
            growth-enhancing initiatives such as investment in human and
            physical capital. However, history suggests caution. Despite
            low interest rates, debt was on a rising trajectory in half
            of EMDEs in 2018. In addition, the cost of rolling over debt
            can increase sharply during periods of financial stress and
            result in financial crises; elevated debt levels can limit
            the ability of governments to provide fiscal stimulus during
            downturns; and high debt can weigh on investment and
            long-term growth. Hence, EMDEs need to strike a careful
            balance between taking advantage of low interest rates and
            avoiding the potentially adverse consequences of excessive
            debt accumulation.
Incidence of the Digital Economy and
            Frictional Unemployment : International Evidence
This paper is the first to quantify the
            relationship between the incidence of the digital economy
            and long-term frictional unemployment across countries. The
            resulting evidence indicates that there is a robust,
            negative partial correlation between national unemployment
            rates and the incidence of the digital economy, proxied by
            the share of the adult population that reports using the
            internet to pay bills. Further, the absolute values of
            ordinary least squares estimates of the partial correlation
            suggest that it might be higher for developing economies
            than high-income economies. Controlling for the incidence of
            informal employment appears to be key for removing a
            positive omitted- variable bias in the estimate of the
            partial correlation between unemployment and the digital
            economy, which is due to the existence of a negative
            bivariate correlation between unemployment and informality
            on the one hand, and a negative bivariate correlation
            between informality and the incidence of digital payment on
            the other hand. The results from instrumental variable
            estimations suggest that the partial correlation between
            unemployment and digital payments is negative, with the
            absolute value of the estimates being larger than the
            absolute value of the ordinary least squares estimates.
When Elephants Make Peace : The
            Impact of the China-U.S. Trade Agreement on Developing Countries
Should the China-U.S. trade agreement
            prompt relief because it averts a damaging trade war or
            concern because selective preferential access for the United
            States to China's markets breaks multilateral rules
            against discrimination? The answer depends on how China
            implements the agreement. Simulations from a computable
            general equilibrium model suggest that the United States and
            China would be better off under this "managed
            trade" agreement than if the trade war had escalated.
            However, compared with the policy status quo, the deal will
            make everyone worse off except the United States and its
            input-supplying neighbor, Mexico.  Real incomes in the rest
            of world would decline by 0.16 percent and in China by 0.38
            percent because of trade diversion.  China can reverse those
            losses if, instead of granting the United States privileged
            entry, it opens its market for all trading partners. Global
            income would be 0.6 percent higher than under the managed
            trade scenario, and China's income would be nearly 0.5
            percent higher. By creating a stronger incentive for China
            to open its markets to all, an exercise in bilateral
            mercantilism has the potential to become an instrument for
            multilateral liberalization.
Peer Effects on Violence :
            Experimental Evidence from El Salvador
Globally, 150 million adolescents report
            being victims of or engaging in peer-to-peer violence in and
            around school. One strategy to reduce this risk is to occupy
            youth in after-school programs (ASP). Yet, the question
            remains: how does peer group composition affect the
            effectiveness of an ASP? This paper addresses this question
            by randomly assigning youths to either a control,
            homogeneous, or heterogeneous peer group within an ASP
            implemented in El Salvador. Results indicate that, unlike
            homogeneous groups, heterogeneous peer groups do help
            students avoid violence. These results are relevant to
            public policy discussions on optimal group composition for
            violence reduction programs.
Internet Job Search, Employment, and
            Wage Growth : Evidence from the Arab Republic of Egypt
This paper assesses the impact of
            Internet job search on employment in the Arab Republic of
            Egypt, the most populous country in the Middle East and
            North Africa region. Using panel data from the 2012 and 2018
            rounds of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey, the paper
            examines the impact of Internet job search by the unemployed
            on their employment prospects. It also examines the impact
            of Internet job search by employed job seekers on their wage
            growth, as well as the impact of digitalization at the
            workplace on earnings. Accounting for individual and
            geographical unobserved heterogeneity using panel data, the
            results suggest that Internet job search is an effective job
            search method, as it increases the probability that the
            unemployed -- and in particular unemployed men -- will find
            employment. Auxiliary placebo regressions confirm that
            preexisting trends in labor market outcomes are not driving
            the results. However, Internet job search by employed job
            seekers does not appear to have an impact on their wage
            growth, nor does digitalization at the workplace affect the
            wage growth of employed individuals.
Using Mobile Phone Data to Reduce
            Spread of Disease
While human mobility has important
            benefits for economic growth, it can generate negative
            externalities. This paper studies the effect of mobility on
            the spread of disease in a low-incidence setting when people
            do not internalize their risks to others. Using malaria as a
            case study and 15 billion mobile phone records across nine
            million SIM cards, this paper causally quantifies the
            relationship between travel and the spread of disease. The
            estimates indicate that an infected traveler contributes to
            1.7 additional cases reported in the health facility at the
            traveler's destination. This paper develops a
            simulation-based policy tool that uses mobile phone data to
            inform strategic targeting of travelers based on their
            origins and destinations. The simulations suggest that
            targeting informed by mobile phone data could reduce the
            caseload by 50 percent more than current strategies that
            rely only on previous incidence.
Spatial Gaps in Management Quality :
            Evidence from a Lagging Region in Croatia
Embedding management and operational
            practices survey in a broader firm capabilities survey, this
            report finds that: (i) relative to the rest of Croatia, an
            average firm in the lagging region of the country (Eastern
            Croatia) is only slightly behind in the adoption of
            structured management practices. Nevertheless, overall,
            Croatia is farther from a frontier economy such as the
            United States. (ii) There is wide heterogeneity in adoption
            of management practices in the country, such that a large
            share of firms in the lagging region are badly managed
            relative to those in the rest of the country. (iii) Better
            managed firms in all regions, including Eastern Croatia,
            show superior firm performance. What drives better
            management? Global linkages matter for firms in other
            countries and in all regions of Croatia except the lagging
            region. Unlike other countries, firms in Croatia do not
            upgrade management quality as they age, perhaps due to lack
            of pro-competitive forces. This report recommends focusing
            on policies that improve allocative efficiency in the region
            and help firms establish global linkages, and more direct
            intervention for improving the management quality of firms.
Incidence of COVID-19 and
            Connections with Air Pollution Exposure : Evidence from the Netherlands
The fast spread of severe acute
            respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has resulted in the
            emergence of several hot-spots around the world. Several of
            these are located in areas associated with high levels of
            air pollution. This study investigates the relationship
            between exposure to particulate matter and COVID-19
            incidence in 355 municipalities in the Netherlands. The
            results show that atmospheric particulate matter with
            diameter less than 2.5 is a highly significant predictor of
            the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and related hospital
            admissions. The estimates suggest that expected COVID-19
            cases increase by nearly 100 percent when pollution
            concentrations increase by 20 percent. The association
            between air pollution and case incidence is robust in the
            presence of data on health-related preconditions, proxies
            for symptom severity, and demographic control variables. The
            results are obtained with ground-measurements and
            satellite-derived measures of atmospheric particulate matter
            as well as COVID-19 data from alternative dates. The
            findings call for further investigation into the association
            between air pollution and SARS-CoV-2 infection risk. If
            particulate matter plays a significant role in COVID-19
            incidence, it has strong implications for the mitigation
            strategies required to prevent spreading.
Determinants of Social Distancing
            and Economic Activity during COVID-19 : A Global View
The paper uses Google mobility data to
            identify the determinants of social distancing during the
            2020 COVID-19 outbreak. The findings for the United States
            indicate that much of the decrease in mobility is voluntary,
            driven by the number of COVID-19 cases and proxying for
            greater awareness of risk. Non-pharmaceutical interventions
            such as closing nonessential businesses, sheltering in
            place, and school closings are also effective, although with
            a total contribution dwarfed by the voluntary actions. This
            suggests that much social distancing will happen regardless
            of the presence of non-pharmaceutical interventions and that
            restrictions may often function more like a coordinating
            device among increasingly predisposed individuals than
            repressive measures per se. These results are consistent
            across country income groups, with only the poorest
            countries showing limited effect of non-pharmaceutical
            interventions and no voluntary component, consistent with
            resistance to abandon sources of livelihood. The paper also
            confirms the direct impact of the voluntary component on
            economic activity, by showing that the majority of the fall
            in restaurant reservations in the United States and movie
            spending in Sweden occurred before the imposition of any
            non-pharmaceutical interventions. Widespread voluntary
            de-mobilization implies that releasing constraints may not
            yield a V-shaped recovery if the reduction in COVID risk is
            not credible.
Nowcasting Economic Activity in
            Times of COVID-19 : An Approximation from the Google
            Community Mobility Report
This paper proposes a leading indicator,
            the "Google Mobility Index," for nowcasting
            monthly industrial production growth rates in selected
            economies in Latin America and the Caribbean. The index is
            constructed using the Google COVID-19 Community Mobility
            Report database via a Kalman filter. The Google database is
            publicly available starting from February 15, 2020. The
            paper uses a backcasting methodology to increase the
            historical number of observations and then augments a lag of
            one week in the mobility data with other high-frequency data
            (air quality) over January 1, 2019 to April 30, 2020.
            Finally, mixed data sampling regression is implemented for
            nowcasting industrial production growth rates. The Google
            Mobility Index is a good predictor of industrial production.
            The results suggest a significant decline in output of
            between 5 and 7 percent for March and April, respectively,
            while indicating a trough in output in mid-April.
The Insights and Illusions of
            Consumption Measurements
Although household well-being is
            anchored in long-term average rates of consumption, welfare
            comparisons typically rely on shorter-duration survey
            measurements. This paper develops a new strategy to identify
            the distribution of these long-term rates by leveraging a
            large-scale randomization that elicited repeated
            short-duration measurements from diaries and recall
            questions. Identification stems from diary-recall
            differences in reports from the same household, does not
            require these reports to be error-free, and hinges on a
            research design with broad replicability. This strategy
            delivers cost-effective suggestions for designing survey
            modules to yield the most accurate measurements of
            consumption well-being, and offers new insights for
            interpreting and reconciling diary-recall differences in
            household expenditure surveys.
Covariate Shocks and Child
            Undernutrition : A Review of Evidence from Low- and
            Middle-Income Countries
Unexpected adverse events that affect
            areas or populations widely (covariate shocks) can have
            major consequences for the welfare of a society. Although
            the negative effects on households, especially among the
            poor, are well established in the economics literature,
            fewer studies have focused on how natural, economic, and
            social covariate shocks affect individual welfare and
            particularly child nutrition status. This paper reviews the
            evidence on the effect of covariate shocks on child
            nutrition status in low- and middle-income countries, the
            pathways through which the effect operates, and the
            relationship between the timing of a child's exposure
            to a covariate shock and the effect on child nutrition
            status. The paper also examines whether public interventions
            can help to mitigate any negative effect and whether the
            effect of covariate shocks can persist in the long term.
            Based on findings from the synthesis of evidence, the paper
            presents considerations and options for public policy and
            future research.
Debt Intolerance : Threshold Level
            and Composition
Fiscal vulnerabilities depend on both
            the level and composition of government debt. This study
            examines the role of debt thresholds and debt composition in
            driving the non-linear behavior of long-term interest rates
            through a novel approach, a panel smooth transition
            regression with a general logistic model. The main findings
            are threefold. First, the impact of the expected public debt
            level on interest rates rises exponentially when the share
            of foreign private holdings exceeds approximately 20 percent
            of government debt denominated in local currency. Second,
            when the share of foreign private investors is 30 percent,
            an increase in the share of foreign private holdings of
            government debt could raise long-term interest rates once
            the public debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 60 percent of GDP,
            offsetting the downward pressure on long-term interest rates
            from higher market liquidity. Third, out-of-sample forecasts
            of this novel non-linear model are more accurate than those
            of previous methods.
Rent-Seeking Activities,
            Misallocation, and Innovation in Argentina
What is the efficiency cost of
            rent-seeking activities in Argentina? This paper
            quantitatively shows that rent-seeking activities in the
            form of bribes have aggregate effects through two channels.
            First, they generate misallocation of resources across firms
            because they prevent resources from flowing to the most
            productive firms, reallocating resources instead to those
            that succeed at rent-seeking. Second, such activities affect
            the allocation of resources within firms because
            rent-seeking drives resources away from innovation. These
            two channels can help in understanding why Argentina has
            more misallocation across firms and less investment in
            research and development, compared with developed economies,
            explaining a sizable portion of Argentina's low productivity.
What Are the Poverty and Inequality
            Impacts of Fiscal Policy in Turkey
Fiscal policy is central to not only
            macroeconomic stability and growth, but also to poverty and
            inequality reduction. This paper provides the most
            comprehensive assessment of the distributional incidence of
            Turkey’s fiscal policy to date. It analyzes the combined and
            individual incidence of direct and indirect taxes,
            transfers, and social spending and benchmarks Turkey’s
            achievements against peer countries. The results show that
            fiscal policy significantly reduces income inequality in
            Turkey, driven by social spending on education and health,
            and complemented by direct taxes and transfer schemes that
            countervail the inequality-increasing impact of indirect
            taxes. At the bottom of the income distribution, targeted
            transfers are insufficient to compensate for the effect of
            taxes, resulting in net increases in poverty. In the context
            of upper-middle-income countries, Turkey’s performance is
            below the median. This is driven by the relatively larger
            negative impacts of indirect taxes and the more limited
            positive impacts of direct transfers and taxes. From a
            policy perspective, the paper contributes to identifying
            entry points for improving the equity impact of the fiscal
            package. Among these, targeting the minimum subsistence
            allowance (AGI) program toward the poor could be an
            efficient way forward. More broadly, the study represents a
            platform to simulate the distributional implications of a
            variety of fiscal changes to inform stakeholders and the
            policy debate.
Using Machine Learning to Assess
            Yield Impacts of Crop Rotation : Combining Satellite and
            Statistical Data for Ukraine
To overcome the constraints for policy
            and practice posed by limited availability of data on crop
            rotation, this paper applies machine learning to freely
            available satellite imagery to identify the rotational
            practices of more than 7,000 villages in Ukraine. Rotation
            effects estimated based on combining these data with
            survey-based yield information point toward statistically
            significant and economically meaningful effects that differ
            from what has been reported in the literature, highlighting
            the value of this approach. Independently derived indices of
            vegetative development and soil water content produce
            similar results, not only supporting the robustness of the
            results, but also suggesting that the opportunities for
            spatial and temporal disaggregation inherent in such data
            offer tremendous unexploited opportunities for
            policy-relevant analysis.