rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Market Access and Development of the
            ICT Sector in the West Bank
Despite the popular view that, with the
            advent of digital technologies, the world has become flat,
            geography still plays a key role in the economy. COVID-19
            has brought even more awareness of this. This paper studies
            the impact of security measures that have reduced the
            mobility of people and goods on the industrial composition
            of the West Bank economy, and, in particular, on the
            development of the information and communications technology
            sector. The paper identifies different channels through
            which changes in market access due to the introduction of
            mobility restrictions can differentially affect industries.
            A newly designed survey instrument is used to identify and
            disentangle these mechanisms separately. This novel data set
            contains information on more than 500 establishments that
            are representative of different sectors of the economy,
            including information and communications technology,
            manufacturing, and retail trade. The analysis finds that the
            mobility restrictions involved a reallocation of resources
            toward the information and communications technology sector,
            as the industry was relatively less affected by the
            restrictions. Yet, the key role of the input-output
            linkages, strong dependence on local clients and suppliers,
            and deep interconnectedness of the information and
            communications technology sector with other domestic
            industries severely limit the extent to which the sector can
            benefit from the reduction in opportunity cost. An
            industrial strategy focusing on the harmonious development
            of the entire economy is advised, rather than targeting a
            specific industry in isolation from the rest.
Political Dividends of Digital
            Participatory Governance : Evidence from Moscow Pothole Management
This study takes advantage of a publicly
            salient policy sphere -- road quality -- in the Russian
            Federation's capital city to explore the use of digital
            technologies as means of aggregating information and
            demonstrating government capacity and effectiveness. It
            focuses on the potential linkage between road quality based
            on citizens' complaints and electoral outcomes in two
            rounds of Moscow mayoral elections in 2013 and 2018. The
            data on more than 200,000 online potholes’ complaints were
            collected and combined with local election data. The causal
            relationship between these two processes is established,
            making use of an arguably exogenous variation in the
            differences across local weather conditions during the
            heating season that differentially affects pothole creation
            but is uncorrelated with electoral outcomes. The results
            indicate that greater use of digital technologies (measured
            by pothole complaints) results in an increased number of
            votes and a higher margin of victory for the incumbent. They
            highlight digital technologies' role as a tool to
            create participatory governance mechanisms and convey to the
            public an image of a transparent, responsive, and capable government.
The Role of Gender in Agent Banking
            : Evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo
This paper uses a unique data set with
            1.1 million customer transactions from a microfinance
            institution in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 2017 to
            2018. The paper provides evidence of assortative gender
            matching in agent banking transactions, as clients prefer to
            transact with agents of their own gender. Female clients
            show a robust preference for female agents even when they
            are less available, particularly when making high-value
            transactions and when they have higher account balances. The
            underrepresentation of female agents may contribute to the
            persistent gender gap in financial access and usage.
How to Improve Education Outcomes
            Most Efficiently ? A Comparison of 150 Interventions Using
            the New Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling Metric
Many low- and middle-income countries
            lag far behind high-income countries in educational access
            and student learning. Limited resources mean that
            policymakers must make tough choices about which investments
            to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education
            interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making
            comparisons between the results is challenging. Some studies
            report changes in years of schooling; others report changes
            in learning. Standard deviations, the metric typically used
            to report learning gains, measure gains relative to a local
            distribution of test scores. This metric makes it hard to
            judge if the gain is worth the cost in absolute terms. This
            paper proposes using learning-adjusted years of schooling
            (LAYS) -- which combines access and quality and compares
            gains to an absolute, cross-country standard -- as a new
            metric for reporting gains from education interventions. The
            paper applies LAYS to compare the effectiveness (and
            cost-effectiveness, where cost is available) of
            interventions from 150 impact evaluations across 46
            countries. The results show that some of the most
            cost-effective programs deliver the equivalent of three
            additional years of high-quality schooling (that is,
            schooling at quality comparable to the highest-performing
            education systems) for just $100 per child -- compared with
            zero years for other classes of interventions.
Measuring the Biases, Burdens, and
            Barriers Women Entrepreneurs Endure in Myanmar
Entrepreneurs in Myanmar face many
            challenges to starting and operating a business. As is the
            experience globally, women often experience these challenges
            to a greater extent and face additional sociocultural
            barriers, limiting their equal participation in the economy.
            To develop a better understanding of the dynamics holding
            back private sector development, especially for women, this
            paper uses data from the first-of-a-kind, firm-level data
            set available in Myanmar. The analysis explores the variance
            of experience female-owned micro, small, and medium-size
            enterprises face compared with their male-owned
            counterparts. The paper assesses the barriers imposed on
            entrepreneurs and their businesses and identifies firm-level
            characteristics leading to the use of good business
            practices. Further, the analysis investigates the adoption
            of gender and family-friendly policies, as an outcome and as
            a determinant of business success. The purpose of the study
            is to gain a better understanding of the barriers to
            gender-inclusive private sector development in Myanmar and
            provide tangible recommendations to private- and
            government-level actors. Overall, the analysis finds the
            major constraints for women entrepreneurs are access to
            finance and sociocultural factors, such as family
            responsibilities and household work.
Poverty Alleviation and
            Interhousehold Transfers : Evidence from BRAC's
            Graduation Program in Bangladesh
Poor households often rely on transfers
            from their social networks for consumption smoothing, yet
            there is limited evidence on how antipoverty programs affect
            informal transfers. This paper exploits the randomized
            roll-out of BRAC's ultra-poor graduation program in
            Bangladesh and panel data covering over 21,000 households
            over seven years to study the program's effects on
            interhousehold transfers. The program crowds out informal
            transfers received by the program's beneficiaries, but
            this is driven mainly by outside-village transfers. Treated
            ultra-poor households become more likely to both give and
            receive transfers to/from wealthier households within their
            communities; and less likely to receive transfers from their
            employers. As a result, the reciprocity of their
            within-village transfers increases. The findings imply that,
            within rural communities, there is positive assortative
            matching by socio-economic status. A reduction in poverty
            enables households to engage more in reciprocal transfer
            arrangements and lowers the interlinkage of their labor with
            informal insurance.
The Drivers of Firms'
            Compliance to Environmental Regulations : The Case of India
Regulatory compliance is key in the
            fight against climate change and other environmental
            challenges. But regulatory agencies, especially in
            developing countries, are often hampered by their capacity
            to monitor and enforce standards and regulations against
            recalcitrant firms. There is now a big push toward
            self-reporting whereby the firms monitor and report on their
            compliance levels vis-a-vis the standards. This is seen as a
            way around the costs that agencies must incur if they were
            to scale up their inspections. In this paper, extensive
            firm-level data from India are used to compare the
            compliance level of firms when they are inspected by
            agencies versus the times when they self-report. Other
            factors that may determine regulatory compliance, such as
            age, size, sector, location, and so forth, are also
            examined. The results indicate that compliance rates are
            higher in the case of self-reporting than in the case of
            inspection, suggesting that there is a need to reform the
            self-report mechanism. Newer and privately owned firms are
            more compliant. There are also differences between complying
            with air and water pollution. Finally, the paper examines
            whether environmental monitoring through inspections leads
            to improvement in compliance levels, to assess the
            effectiveness of the regulations and inspections. The
            findings suggest that the increase in compliance is limited
            to a few industries.
The Coronavirus Pandemic and Food
            Security : Evidence from West Africa
This paper documents some of the first
            estimates of the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on food
            security in a low- and middle-income country context. It
            combines nationally representative pre- pandemic household
            survey data with follow-up phone survey data from Mali and
            exploits sub- national variation in the intensity of
            pandemic-related disruptions between urban and rural areas.
            These disruptions stem from both government policies aiming
            to slow the spread of the virus and also individual behavior
            motivated by fear of contracting the virus. The paper finds
            evidence of increasing food insecurity in Mali associated
            with the pandemic. Difference-in-difference estimates show
            that moderate food insecurity increased by about 8
            percentage points -- a 33 percent increase -- in urban areas
            compared with rural areas in Mali. The estimates are
            substantially larger than existing predictions of the
            average effect of the pandemic on food security globally and
            therefore highlights the critical importance of
            understanding effect heterogeneity.
COVID-19 and Food Security in
            Ethiopia : Do Social Protection Programs Protect
This paper assesses the impact of
            Ethiopia's flagship social protection program, the
            Productive Safety Net Program on the adverse impacts of the
            COVID-19 pandemic on the food and nutrition security of
            households, mothers, and children. The analysis uses
            pre-pandemic, in-person household survey data and a
            post-pandemic phone survey. Two-thirds of the respondents
            reported that their incomes had fallen after the pandemic
            began, and almost half reported that their ability to
            satisfy their food needs had worsened. Employing a household
            fixed effects difference-in-difference approach, the study
            finds that household food insecurity increased by 11.7
            percentage points and the size of the food gap by 0.47
            months in the aftermath of the onset of the pandemic.
            Participation in the Productive Safety Net Program offsets
            virtually all of this adverse change -- the likelihood of
            becoming food insecure increased by only 2.4 percentage
            points for Productive Safety Net Program households and the
            duration of the food gap increased by only 0.13 month. The
            protective role of the program is greater for poorer
            households and those living in remote areas. The results are
            robust to various definitions of program participation,
            different estimators, and different ways of accounting for
            the non-randomness of mobile phone ownership. Productive
            Safety Net Program participants were less likely to reduce
            expenditures on health and education by 7.7 percentage
            points and less likely to reduce expenditures on
            agricultural inputs by 13 percentage points. By contrast,
            mothers' and children's diets changed little,
            despite some changes in the composition of diets, with
            consumption of animal source foods declining significantly.
Dynamics and Synchronization of
            Global Equilibrium Interest Rates
With the COVID-19 pandemic, the intense
            debate about secular stagnation will become even more
            important. Empirical estimates of equilibrium real interest
            rates are so far mostly limited to advanced economies, since
            no statistical procedure suitable for a large set of
            countries is available. This is surprising, as equilibrium
            rates have strong policy implications in emerging markets
            and developing economies as well; current estimates of the
            global equilibrium rate rely on only a few countries; and
            estimates for a more diverse set of countries can improve
            understanding of the drivers. This paper proposes a model
            and estimation strategy that decompose ex ante real interest
            rates into a permanent and transitory component even with
            short samples and high volatility. This is done with an
            unobserved component local level stochastic volatility
            model, which is used to estimate equilibrium rates for 50
            countries with Bayesian methods. Equilibrium rates were
            lower in emerging markets and developing economies than in
            advanced economies in the 1980s, similar in the 1990s, and
            have been higher since 2000. In line with economic
            integration and rising global capital markets,
            synchronization has been rising over time and is higher
            among advanced economies. Equilibrium rates of countries
            with stronger trade linkages and similar demographic and
            economic trends are more synchronized.
Actual and Potential Trade
            Agreements in the Asia-Pacific : Estimated Effects
This paper assesses and compares the
            economic impacts of four actual and potential free trade
            agreements in the Asia-Pacific Region: the Comprehensive and
            Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the
            original Trans Pacific Partnership, the Regional
            Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and the Free Trade Area
            of the Asia-Pacific. Free trade areas with a larger scale
            and wider membership are expected to produce higher
            aggregate gains in increased gross domestic product and
            trade flows. U.S. withdrawal from the original Trans-Pacific
            Partnership reduced estimated gross domestic product gains
            for the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for
            Trans-Pacific Partnership countries by about half.  For
            countries belonging to the Comprehensive and Progressive
            Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and also negotiating
            the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the
            potential gains from an agreement with China and the
            Republic of Korea are substantial, but not as large as if
            the United States were to rejoin the original Trans-Pacific
            Partnership.  On a sectoral basis, significant structural
            shifts are observed for food processing, wearing apparel,
            textiles, and transport equipment.
Assessing the Effects of Fiscal
            Policies on Poverty and Inequality : The Case of Uruguay
This study looks at the redistributive
            effects of fiscal policy -- in particular of direct taxation
            and expenditures -- in Uruguay. This fiscal incidence
            analysis applies a widely recognized methodology to
            household survey data and government data for fiscal year
            2017 and compares the results with the policies seen in 2009
            to study the evolution of the distributional impacts of
            fiscal policy in the country. The study finds evidence that
            Uruguayan fiscal policy continues to reduce inequality, with
            government expenditures in the form of in-kind transfers
            leading to the largest decreases. While expenditures in
            basic education are benefitting the poorest, expenditures in
            tertiary education remain largely regressive. The personal
            income tax is found to be largely progressive, with the top
            quintile paying more than four-fifths of this tax. Uruguay’s
            fiscal policies also lead to a reduction in poverty, mainly
            due to well-targeted direct transfers.
Identification Properties for
            Estimating the Impact of Regulation on Markups and Productivity
This paper addresses several
            shortcomings in the productivity and markup estimation
            literature. Using Monte-Carlo simulations, the analysis
            shows that the methods in Ackerberg, Caves and Frazer (2015)
            and De Loecker and Warzynski (2012) produce biased estimates
            of the impact of policy variables on markups and
            productivity. This bias stems from endogeneity due to the
            following: (1) the functional form of the production
            function; (2) the omission of demand shifters; (3) the
            absence of price information; (4) the violation of the
            Markov process for productivity; and (5) misspecification
            when marginal costs are excluded in the estimation. The
            paper addresses these concerns using a quasi-maximum
            likelihood approach and a generalized estimator for the
            production function. It produces unbiased estimates of the
            impact of regulation on markups and productivity. The paper
            therefore proposes a work-around solution for the
            identification problem identified in Bond, Hashemi, Kaplan
            and Zoch (2020), and an unbiased measure of productivity, by
            directly accounting for the joint impact of regulation on
            markups and productivity.
Technology and Demand Drivers of
            Productivity Dynamics in Developed and Emerging Market Economies
Frequently, factors other than
            structural developments in technology and production
            efficiency drive changes in labor productivity in advanced
            and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). This
            paper uses a new method to extract technology shocks that
            excludes these influences, resulting in lasting improvements
            in labor productivity. The same methodology in turn is used
            to identify a stylized example of the effects of a demand
            shock on productivity. Technology innovations are
            accompanied by higher and more rapidly increasing rates of
            investment in EMDEs relative to advanced economies,
            suggesting that positive technological developments are
            often capital-embodied in the former economies. Employment
            falls in both advanced economies and EMDEs following
            positive technology developments, with the effect smaller
            but more persistent in EMDEs. Uncorrelated technological
            developments across economies suggest that global
            synchronization of labor productivity growth is due to
            cyclical (demand) influences. Demand drivers of labor
            productivity are found to have highly persistent effects in
            EMDEs and some advanced economies. Unlike technology shocks,
            however, demand shocks influence labor productivity only
            through the capital deepening channel, particularly in
            economies with low capacity for counter-cyclical fiscal
            policy. Overall, non-technological factors accounted for
            most of the fall in labor productivity growth during 2007-08
            and around one-third of the longer-term productivity decline
            after the global financial crisis.
Remittances and Labor Supply in the
            Northern Triangle
Through substitution and income effects,
            remittances can alter an individual's allocation of
            time between market activities and household production,
            decreasing labor supply. This paper uses propensity score
            matching and household surveys for 2006 and 2014 to estimate
            the impact of remittances on labor supply in the three
            countries of the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala,
            and Honduras). The results show that remittances are
            associated with a reduction in labor force participation,
            particularly among women. This effect is largest for
            Salvadoran women (13 percentage points). A sensitivity
            analysis finds that the negative effect on labor force
            participation rates of men in El Salvador and Guatemala and
            women in El Salvador is robust to potential selection bias.
            Receiving remittances is also associated with a lower
            likelihood of young adults being in school or at work, with
            this effect being robust to selection bias for young men in
            Guatemala. At the same time, the evidence suggests that
            remittances may be supporting small enterprises and
            self-employment in El Salvador and Guatemala. The analysis
            does not find robust evidence of remittances affecting the
            labor supply in Honduras in 2014.