rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling
            (LAYS) : Defining A New Macro Measure of Education
The standard summary metric of
            education-based human capital used in macro analyses—the
            average number of years of schooling in a population—is
            based only on quantity. But ignoring schooling quality turns
            out to be a major omission. As recent research shows,
            students in different countries who have completed the same
            number of years of school often have vastly different
            learning outcomes. This paper therefore proposes a new
            summary measure, Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling
            (LAYS), that combines quantity and quality of schooling into
            a single easy-to-understand metric of progress. The
            cross-country comparisons produced by this measure are
            robust to different ways of adjusting for learning (for
            example, by using different international assessments or
            different summary learning indicators), and the assumptions
            and implications of LAYS are consistent with other evidence,
            including other approaches to quality adjustment. The paper
            argues that (1) LAYS improves on the standard metric,
            because it is a better predictor of important outcomes, and
            it improves incentives for policymakers; and (2) its virtues
            of simplicity and transparency make it a good candidate
            summary measure of education.
How Should the Government Bring
            Small Firms into the Formal System Experimental Evidence
            from Malawi
Developing country governments seek to
            reduce the pervasive informality of firms for multiple
            reasons: increasing the tax base, helping firms access
            formal markets and grow, increasing the rule of law, and as
            a means to obtain data that can be used for other government
            functions. However, there is debate as to the best approach
            for achieving these goals. This study conducted a randomized
            experiment in Malawi to test three alternatives: (a)
            assisting firms to obtain a business registration
            certificate that offers access to formal markets but imposes
            no tax obligations; (b) assisting firms to obtain business
            registration and tax registration; and (c) supplementing the
            assistance to obtain business registration with a bank
            information session intended to help firms utilize one of
            the key potential benefits of formalizing. The study finds
            incredibly high demand for obtaining a formal status that is
            separate from tax obligations, and very low take-up of tax
            registration. Business registration alone has no impact on
            access to formal markets or firm performance. However,
            coupling registration assistance with the bank information
            session increases the use of formal financial services, and
            results in increases in firm sales by 20 percent and profits
            by 15 percent. The results highlight the advantages of
            separating business and tax registration, but also the need
            to assist firms in benefiting from their new formal status.
How Does Poverty Differ Among
            Refugees Taking a Gender Lens to the Data on Syrian Refugees
            in Jordan
Data collected for refugee registration
            and to target humanitarian assistance include information
            about household composition and demographics that can be
            used to identify gender-based vulnerabilities. This paper
            combines the microdata collected by United Nations High
            Commissioner for Refugees to register refugees with data
            from its Home Visit surveys to analyze income poverty rates
            among refugees with a gender lens. It finds distinguishing
            between different types of male and female principal
            applicant (PA) households is important in the setting of
            Syrian refugees in Jordan. Poverty rates for couples with
            children do not differ by gender of the PA but for other
            household types poverty rates are higher for those with
            female PAs. Households formed because of the unpredictable
            dynamics of forced displacement, such as sibling households,
            unaccompanied children, and single caregivers, are extremely
            vulnerable, especially if the principal applicant is a woman
            or a girl.
Stationary Bandits, State Capacity,
            and the Malthusian Transition : The Lasting Impact of the
            Taiping Rebellion
The Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) in
            China was the deadliest civil war in history. This paper
            provides evidence that this cataclysmic event significantly
            shaped the Malthusian transition and long-term development
            that followed, especially in areas where the experiences
            that stemmed from the rebellion led to better property
            rights, stronger local fiscal capacity, and rule by leaders
            with longer-term governance horizons.  More than one and a
            half centuries after the rebellion’s end, population
            increases from pre-war levels remain 38 to 67 percent lower
            in areas that were affected by the rebellion than in those
            that were unaffected. Moreover, areas that were affected by
            the rebellion have, on average, greater fiscal capacity and
            modern economic sectors to the present day. Two channels for
            the effects of the rebellion are stationary banditry
            (manifested by varying property rights and the rebellion
            area's proximity to the Taiping capital), and the
            wartime strengthening of fiscal capacity. The analysis shows
            evidence of complementarity between wartime state capacity
            and local institutions, and of the long-term benefits of
            fiscal decentralization in a large country. Furthermore,
            initial human capital is strongly associated with long-term development.
Identifying Urban Areas by Combining
            Data from the Ground and from Outer Space : An Application
            to India
This paper develops a tractable method
            to identify urban areas and applies it to India, where
            urbanization is messy. Google Earth images are assessed
            subjectively to determine whether a stratified large sample
            of Indian cities, towns and villages, as officially defined,
            are urban or rural in practice. Based on these assessments,
            a regression analysis combines two sources of
            information—data from georeferenced population censuses and
            data from satellite imagery—to identify the correlates of
            units in the sample being urban. The resulting model is used
            to predict whether the other units in the country are urban
            or rural in practice. Contrary to frequent claims, India is
            not substantially more urban than implied by census data.
            And the speed of urbanization is only marginally higher than
            official statistics suggest. But a considerable number of
            locations are misclassified in the midrange between villages
            and state capitals. The results confirm the value of
            combining subjective assessments with data from these
            different sources.
Mongolia : Distributional Impact of
            Taxes and Transfers
This paper uses Mongolia's
            Household Socio Economic Survey for 2016 to estimate the
            distributive impact of taxes and transfers.  The findings
            show that the system is progressive and contributes to
            reductions in poverty and inequality. The Gini coefficient
            of the pre-tax-and-transfer income is 0.4183 and decreases
            to 0.3507 after-tax-and-transfer. This is a reduction of
            6.76 Gini points (around 16 percent). Something similar
            happens with the poverty rate, which decreases from 47.31 to
            31.96 percent. Despite the progressiveness of the whole
            system, there are some caveats and policy warnings. First,
            pensions are the most redistributive instrument in the
            system, but their actuarial and fiscal sustainability is
            weak. Second, two programs (the child money program and the
            mortgage subsidy) do little redistribution -- the latter is
            actually regressive -- but represent a large share of the
            budget (around 2.5 percent of gross domestic product). These
            two factors, and the fact that up to a 35 percent of total
            expenditures in monetary and in-kind transfers is funded by
            corporate taxes and royalties -- which are highly dependent
            on volatile commodity prices—make the redistributive impact
            of the tax-and-transfer system susceptible to fiscal unsustainability.
Media Sentiment and International
            Asset Prices
This paper assesses the impact of media
            sentiment on international equity prices using a dataset of
            more than 4.5 million Reuters articles published across the
            globe between 1991 and 2015. Media sentiment robustly
            predicts daily returns in both advanced and emerging
            markets, even after controlling for known determinants of
            stock prices. But not all news sentiment is alike. A local
            (country-specific) increase in news optimism (pessimism)
            predicts a small and transitory increase (decrease) in local
            returns. By contrast, changes in global news sentiment have
            a larger impact on equity returns around the world, which
            does not reverse in the short run. Media sentiment affects
            mainly foreign -- rather than local -- investors: although
            local news optimism attracts international equity flows for
            a few days, global news optimism generates a permanent
            foreign equity inflow. Our results confirm the value of
            media content in capturing investor sentiment.
Human Capital and Macro-Economic
            Development : A Review of the Evidence
This paper reviews the evidence on the
            importance of human capital for macro-economic development.
            Through the lens of a simple aggregate production function,
            human capital might increase output per capita by directly
            entering in the production process, incentivising the
            accumulation of complementary inputs and facilitating the
            adoption of new technologies. The paper discusses the
            advantages and limitations of three methodological
            approaches that have been used to evaluate the importance of
            these channels: cross-country regressions, development
            accounting and quantitative models. The key findings in the
            literature are reviewed, and some of them are replicated
            using updated data. The bulk of the evidence suggests that
            human capital is an important determinant of cross-country
            income gaps, especially when its measurement is broadened to
            go beyond simple proxies of educational attainment. The
            paper concludes by highlighting promising avenues for future work.
Extreme Weather and Poverty Risk :
            Evidence from Multiple Shocks in Mozambique
This paper investigates the effects of
            multiple weather shocks on household welfare in Mozambique,
            as well as some of the coping responses and price mechanisms
            at play. The analysis employs a triple-difference strategy
            that exploits variation in the shocks across space, time,
            and cropping cycles. The findings demonstrate high levels of
            vulnerability across various weather risks. Experiencing a
            cyclone, flood, or drought leads to a drop of up to 25-30
            percent in per capita food consumption and around 0.4 fewer
            meals per day per person. Poverty increased by 12 and 17.5
            percentage points in two of the three events analyzed. Human
            capital accumulation, as measured by school participation
            and morbidity, is disrupted. Households follow risk-coping
            strategies, such as increasing the labor supply of their
            children or selling assets, which entail partial protection
            in the aftermath of the shock at the cost of lower income
            growth in the future. In disentangling the channels, the
            paper shows that maize prices exhibit higher volatility in
            food markets that are spatially close to the most affected
            areas. The results are robust to several robustness checks,
            including analysis of bias from selective migration, and
            indicate that household welfare and economic mobility in
            low-income environments are constrained by uninsured weather risks.
Shifting Social Norms to Reduce Open
            Defecation in Rural India
Toilet ownership in India has grown in
            recent years, but open defecation can persist even when
            rural households own latrines. There are at least two
            pathways through which social norms inhibit the use of
            toilets in rural India: (i) beliefs/expectations that others
            do not use toilets or latrines or find open defecation
            unacceptable; and (ii) beliefs about ritual notions of
            purity that dissociate latrines from cleanliness. A survey
            in Uttar Pradesh, India, finds a positive correlation
            between latrine use and social norms at baseline. To
            confront these, an information campaign was piloted to test
            the effectiveness of rebranding latrine use and promoting
            positive social norms. The intervention, which made
            information about growing latrine use among latrine owners
            more salient, reduced open defecation practices across all
            treatment households, with average latrine use score in
            treatment villages increasing by up to 11 percent, relative
            to baseline. Large improvements were also observed in
            pro-latrine beliefs. This suggests that low-cost information
            campaigns can effectively improve pro-latrine beliefs and
            practices, as well as shift perceptions of why many people
            still find open defecation acceptable. Measuring social
            norms as described can help diagnose barriers to reducing
            open defecation, contribute to the quality of large-scale
            surveys, and make development interventions more sustainable.
Persistent Misallocation and the
            Returns to Education in Mexico
Over the last two decades, Mexico has
            experienced macroeconomic stability, an open trade regime,
            and substantial progress in education. Yet average
            workers' earnings have stagnated, and earnings of those
            with higher schooling have fallen, compressing the earnings
            distribution and lowering the returns to education. This
            paper argues that distortions that misallocate resources
            toward less-productive firms explain these phenomena,
            because these firms are less intensive in well-educated
            workers compared with more-productive ones. It shows that
            while the relative supply of workers with more years of
            schooling has increased, misallocation of resources toward
            less productive firms has persisted. These two trends have
            generated a widening mismatch between the supply of, and the
            demand for, educated workers. The paper breaks down worker
            earnings into observable and unobservable firm and
            individual worker characteristics, and computes a
            counterfactual earnings distribution in the absence of
            misallocation. The main finding is that in the absence of
            misallocation average earnings would be higher, and that
            earnings differentials across schooling levels would widen,
            raising the returns to education. A no-misallocation path is
            constructed for the wage premium. Depending on parameter
            values, this path is found to be rising or constant, in
            contrast to the observed downward path. The paper concludes
            arguing that the persistence of misallocation impedes Mexico
            from taking full advantage of its investments in the
            education of its workforce.
The Short-Term Impact of
            Inter-Community Volunteering Activities and Soft Skills
            Training on Self-Reported Social Cohesion Values :
            Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Lebanon
Despite its growing popularity, evidence
            that volunteering enhances civic values and social cohesion
            among different communities remains limited in developing
            countries. This study presents novel evidence from Lebanon
            on the impact of offering a volunteering program that
            consisted of inter-community volunteering activities and
            soft skills training on self-reported social cohesion values
            in the short term. The results show that youth who were
            selected to participate in the program were more likely to
            report higher tolerance values as well as a stronger sense
            of belonging to the Lebanese community roughly one year
            after the completion of activities. The results show that
            selection into the program had no impact on improving
            volunteers' soft skills that were thought to contribute
            to social cohesion. This finding implies that the mechanism
            for improved social cohesion values most likely came from
            the program's innovative feature, which required 20
            percent of selected youth to come from communities outside
            where the area where the project was implemented. Selection
            into the program had no impact on other secondary measures,
            namely, employability and employment outcomes. The results
            should be interpreted with caution, given study design
            limitations that relate to the nonrandom assignment of youth
            into the treatment and comparison groups, as well as the
            presence of nonrandom attrition between the two tracked time periods.
Long-Term Evolution of Inequality of Opportunity
The main goal of this paper is to
            document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality
            of opportunity and thus extend the recent empirical
            literature, which is mainly concerned with its measurement
            at a specific point in time. Using repeated cross-section
            surveys for five European countries (France, Germany, Great
            Britain, Italy, and Switzerland), the evolution of
            inequality of opportunity is measured for a period of about
            two decades for the whole populations, as well as for
            different birth cohorts. Relative inequality of opportunity
            represents an important portion of total income inequality,
            with values ranging from 30 to 50 percent according to the
            standard deviation of logs (and reaching a lower share in
            case of mean log deviation) and, for all the countries, it
            shows a stable or declining time trend. When the birth
            cohorts are followed across time, inequality of opportunity
            decreases with age: the effect of circumstances seems to
            weaken over the life cycle. This is a quite different age
            profile from that of inequality of outcomes (income or
            consumption), which generally increases with age. A
            decomposition of the relative inequality of opportunity
            allows highlighting some key drivers of its time evolution.
            In all the countries, there has been a clear enhancement of
            equality of educational opportunity (as captured by a
            downward trending intergenerational education persistence)
            and a reduction of the returns to education. However, for
            some countries, notably Italy, these trends have failed to
            translate into decreasing inequality of opportunity in the
            income distribution because of the increasing role of
            parental networking (an additional channel through which
            parental background affects the incomes of offspring).
Can Regulation Promote Financial Inclusion
Despite the commitments of the
            development community toward broader access to finance,
            financial inclusion rates worldwide are rather
            unsatisfactory. To date, around two billion adults do not
            have access to basic financial services such as savings and
            checking accounts. Attempting to bridge such gap between
            policy objectives and outcomes, several economists have
            probed the determinants of financial inclusion. This paper
            contributes to the debate by investigating the role played
            by financial regulation. First, the paper proposes a broad
            index of regulatory quality for financial inclusion,
            emphasizing the role of nontraditional delivery models, for
            example, branchless banking, and actors, for example,
            nonbank lending institutions. Second, the paper tests the
            relationship between regulatory quality and financial
            inclusion outcomes. The analysis finds that in countries
            where regulatory quality is within the top quartile,
            individuals are 12.4 percent more likely to have an account
            at a financial institution with respect to bottom quartile countries.
Discriminatory Laws Against Women :
            A Survey of the Literature
This paper reviews the empirical
            literature on the existence and impact of gender
            discriminatory laws on women's outcomes across various
            domains (categories) that constitute the Women in Business
            and the Law measure of gender inequality. The evidence to
            date suggests that there are significant negative
            consequences of legal gender discrimination on women's
            outcomes. However, there is considerable variation in the
            depth of the literature across different domains. In
            addition, a significant share of the evidence for certain
            domains is drawn from developed countries, which raises
            questions about its relevance for developing countries. The
            literature also highlights some potential unintended
            consequences of well-intended policy interventions to
            address legal gender discrimination in certain domains. The
            paper concludes with a discussion of the various theories
            relating women's legal rights to their outcomes.