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Group Incentives for the Public Good: A Field Experiment on Improving the Urban Environment The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Carol Newman, Tara Mitchell, Marcus Holmlund, Chloë Fernandez
What strategies can help communities to overcome the public goods problem in the maintenance of communal spaces and infrastructure in urban environments? This paper investigates whether an intervention targeted at Community-Based Organizations can motivate them to make increased contributions to the public good, thereby improving outcomes for the community as a whole. Using a randomized controlled
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Documenting Decentralization: Empirical Evidence on Administrative Unit Proliferation from Uganda The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-03-09 Isabelle Cohen
Decentralization is an important and commonplace type of reform, yet our understanding of its effects remains limited. This paper documents the effects of the 2009–10 wave of district creation in Uganda, which increased the country’s districts by 42 percent, using rich data on subdistrict units to assess the effects of district creation on a broad range of post-decentralization outcomes in a diffe
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Village Fairness Norms and Land-Rental Markets The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Kwabena Krah, Annemie Maertens, Wezi Mhango, Hope Michelson, Vesall Nourani
This paper documents the role of village fairness norms in land markets. A strong and robust relationship is established between experimentally elicited village-level fairness norms and land-rental rates across 250 Malawian villages. Stronger fairness norms correlate with a tighter range in village rental rates. The study suggests that the fairness norms for tenants appear to be more important, constraining
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Deep Trade Agreements and Firm Ownership in GVCs The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Peter H Egger, Gerard Masllorens
This paper focuses on the effect of preferential trade agreements and their depth on firm-to-firm ownership, in particular, along global value chains. It measures shareholder–affiliate ownership links at the country-sector-pair level to distinguish between vertical and horizontal links. The findings show that preferential trade agreements boost vertical international investment links (both backward
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Heuristics on Call: The Impact of Mobile-Phone-Based Business-Management Advice The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Shawn Cole, Mukta Joshi, Antoinette Schoar
There is growing evidence that business training for micro-entrepreneurs can be effective. However, in-person training can be expensive and imposes costs on the target beneficiaries. This paper presents the results of a two-site randomized evaluation of a light-touch, mobile-phone-based business-training service for micro-entrepreneurs in India and the Philippines. The results show that the training
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Public Child Care Provision: Unraveling the Consequences of Implementation Variations for Women's Time Allocation The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Catherine Mata
From analysis of the effects of a national childcare policy on women's time allocation in Costa Rica, it is found that childcare services are associated with increased female labor force participation, greater educational enrollment, and reduced unpaid care work. However, a comparison of two implementing agencies indicates that the overall effects vary by agency. One agency's services yield positive
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The Causal Effect of Early Marriage on Women's Bargaining Power: Evidence from Bangladesh The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Salauddin Tauseef, Farha Deba Sufian
Early marriage restrains women's agency and bargaining strength in postmarital households, impairing their ability to make meaningful contributions to household decision making. This paper employs a comprehensive measure of women's empowerment in the domestic and productive spheres, and isolates the causal effect of age at marriage, instrumented by age at menarche, on their bargaining strength, using
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Crime and Gender Segregation: Evidence from the Bogota “Pico y Genero” Lockdown The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Brian Knight, Maria Mercedes Ponce de Leon, Ana Tribin
The city of Bogota implemented a lockdown during the pandemic under which only men were allowed out on odd days and only women were allowed out on even days. Crime rates in Bogota increased, relative to a synthetic Bogota and relative to the pre-period, during this gender-based lockdown. Moreover, this increase is driven by more crime on men-only days and, more specifically, more robberies with male
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Effect of Moderate and Radical Rules on High-Caste Behavior and Norms in India The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Pavitra Govindan
Development and legal researchers hypothesize that a moderate law may be more effective than a radical one in changing behavior. This study tests this hypothesis in the context of discriminatory sharing norms practiced by high-caste individuals against low-caste individuals in India. The study employs a lab-in-the-field experiment in which it influences (a) high-caste participants’ social norms of
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Removing Barriers to Entry in Medicine: Evidence from Pakistan The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Fatima Aqeel
In 1992, Pakistan equalized admissions criteria for women and men applying to medical schools, causing a rapid increase in the female share of medical graduates. Using birth cohort variation, I find that equalizing admissions criteria increased employment among female doctors by 21 percentage points and among doctors overall by 9 percentage points, even though female doctors are less likely to be employed
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Agricultural Productivity and Land Inequality: Evidence from the Philippines The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-12-26 Ludovic Bequet
How do agricultural productivity gains affect the distribution of agricultural land? Exploiting three waves of census data from the Philippines covering 21 years and 17 million plots, this article finds that municipalities endowed with favorable soil and weather conditions for genetically modified (GM) corn cultivation experience a relative increase in landholding inequality. Agricultural land is decreasing
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Social Protection and Foundational Cognitive Skills during Adolescence: Evidence from a Large Public Works Program The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Richard Freund, Marta Favara, Catherine Porter, Jere Behrman
Many low- and middle-income countries have introduced public works programs (PWPs) to fight poverty. This paper provides the first evidence that children from families who benefit from PWPs show increased foundational cognitive skills. The results, based on unique tablet-based data collected as part of a long-standing longitudinal survey, show positive associations between participation in the Productive
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Allocative Efficiency between and within the Formal and Informal Manufacturing Sectors in Zimbabwe The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Godfrey Kamutando, Lawrence Edwards
Resource misallocation has the potential to reduce aggregate total factor productivity and undermine industrial development. Aggregate productivity losses are found to be particularly pronounced in emerging economies where large market frictions impede efficient resource allocation. Available estimates, however, almost entirely exclude firms in the informal sector that in some countries, such as Zimbabwe
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The Short- and Longer-Term Effects of a Child Labor Ban The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Caio Piza, André Portela Souza, Patrick M Emerson, Vivian Amorim
This paper investigates whether the 1998 Brazilian law that increased the minimum employment age from 14 to 16 lowered child labor and increased school attendance and whether those effects persisted beyond age 16. Using a regression discontinuity design, the results indicate that the ban had a significant impact on urban boys, a cohort that represents half of all paid child labor in Brazil. This cohort
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Making Data Count: Estimating a Poverty Trend for Nigeria between 2009 and 2019 The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Jonathan Lain, Marta Schoch, Tara Vishwanath
Monitoring poverty reduction requires frequent microdata on household welfare that can be compared over time. Such data are unavailable in many countries, given limited statistical capacity, shocks that prevent data collection, and regular improvements to survey methodology. This paper demonstrates how jointly deploying backcasting and survey-to-survey imputations can help to overcome this in a setting
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How Much Does the Food Insecurity Experience Scale Overlap with Poor Food Consumption and Monetary Poverty? Evidence from West Africa The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-10-12 Jonathan Lain, Sharad Tandon, Tara Vishwanath
The Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), which combines three food-access dimensions into a single indicator, is rapidly being incorporated into national statistical systems. However, there is no prediction about how one of the incorporated dimensions—subjective experiences associated with food insecurity—overlaps with poor food consumption. Using data from West Africa, this study illustrates that
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The Rise in Women’s Labor-Force Participation in Mexico—Supply vs. Demand Factors The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Sonia Bhalotra, Manuel Fernández
This study estimates the relative importance of alternative supply and demand mechanisms in explaining the rise of female labor-force participation (FLFP) over the last 55 years in Mexico. The growth of FLFP in Mexico between 1960 and 2015 followed an S-shaped, with a considerable acceleration during the 1990s. Using descriptive decomposition methods and a shift-share design, the study shows that,
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Raising the Age of Marriage Entry and Child's Nutrition Intake? Evidence from the Reform of Ethiopia's Family Law The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Uchenna Efobi
This study investigates the impact of a family law reform in Ethiopia that raises the age of marriage entry for females (among other aspects of the law) on the nutritional intake of the children of affected women. Using the difference-in-differences and event-study strategies, the result suggests that exposure to the reform led to a significant increase in dietary diversity (14 percent increase relative
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Labor Market and Macroeconomic Dynamics in Latin America amid COVID: The Role of Digital-Adoption Policies The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Alan Finkelstein Shapiro, Victoria Nuguer, Santiago Novoa Gomez
This paper analyzes how a policy that lowers firm digital-adoption costs shapes the labor-market and economic recovery from COVID-19 in Latin America (LA) using a framework with firm entry and unemployment, where salaried firms can adopt digital technologies and the employment and firm structure embodies key features of LA economies. Using Mexico as a case study, the model replicates the response of
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The Combined Role of Subsidy and Discussion Intervention in the Demand for a Stigmatized Product The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Vinish Shrestha, Rashesh Shrestha
This paper studies the joint role of subsidization and group discussion intervention in increasing the demand for sanitary pads—a product that is widely available but demand for which may be curtailed due to the psychological cost associated with menstrual stigmatization. The study deploys a field experiment in Nepal to randomly allocate discount coupons of various values so that participants face
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Public Pre-Primary and Maternal Employment in Algeria: Evidence from a Natural Experiment The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Caroline Krafft, Moundir Lassassi
Globally, employment rates of women remain substantially below those of men. Since women disproportionately care for children, policies that offer care alternatives or lower the cost of care, should, theoretically, increase women's employment. This paper tests whether public pre-primary education can increase women's employment, using a natural experiment in Algeria. Education reforms in Algeria substantially
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The Social Protection Engel Curve The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Michael Lokshin, Martin Ravallion, Iván Torre
Why do richer countries spend a higher share of their income on social protection than poor countries? A newly assembled dataset on social protection spending for 142 countries since 1995 allows an exploration of alternate hypotheses, treating the pandemic period separately, as it entailed a large expansion in social protection efforts. While the mean income share devoted to social protection rises
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Female Education and Brideprice: Evidence from Primary Education Reform in Uganda The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Masaru Nagashima, Chikako Yamauchi
Universal primary education (UPE) policies have been shown to improve educational attainment and delay marriage and childbearing, particularly among rural girls. This disproportionate improvement in female relative to male education can change the bargaining structure between the wife and the husband. Furthermore, with the expectation of this change, decisions about marriage-market entry, matching
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Employment Mismatches Drive Expectational Earnings Errors among Mozambican Graduates The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Sam Jones, Ricardo Santos, Gimelgo Xirinda
Biased beliefs about future labor-market earnings are commonplace. Based on a longitudinal survey of graduate work transitions in Mozambique, this study assesses the contribution of employment mismatches to a large positive gap between expected (ex ante) and realized (ex post) earnings. Accounting for the simultaneous determination of pecuniary and non-pecuniary work characteristics, employment mismatches
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Nudging Payment Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Pay-as-You-Go Off-Grid Electricity The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-06-25 Jacopo Bonan, Giovanna d’Adda, Mahreen Mahmud, Farah Said
This paper reports results from a randomized control trial with a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solar system provider in Pakistan. In the default treatment, customers are told the amount to pay every month to keep the system active. In a first treatment, customers are assisted in planning this monthly payment. A second treatment discloses that payments can be made flexibly within the month. This disclosure
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Long-Term Effects of an Education Stipend Program on Domestic Violence: Evidence from Bangladesh The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Raisa Sara, Sadia Priyanka
Intimate partner violence (IPV) remains a widespread global phenomenon. Among various factors, a low level of education is considered a significant risk factor for experiencing IPV. This paper evaluates whether a secondary school stipend program introduced in 1994 for rural girls affected the long-term prevalence of IPV in Bangladesh. The study exploits two sources of variation in the intensity of
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The Effects of Community Health Worker Visits and Primary Care Subsidies on Health Behavior and Health Outcomes for Children in Urban Mali The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Mark Dean, Anja Sautmann
Subsidized primary care and community health worker (CHW) visits are important demand-side policies in the effort to achieve universal health care for children aged under 5. Causal evidence on the interaction between these policies is still sparse. This paper reports the effects on diarrhea prevention, curative care, and incidence as well as anthropometrics for 1,649 children from a randomized controlled
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Reducing Delay in Payments in Welfare Programs: Experimental Evidence from an Information Dissemination Intervention The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-04-29 Upasak Das, Amartya Paul, Mohit Sharma
This paper assesses the impact of an information dissemination intervention on the local-level implementation of the rural public works program in India. One key feature of the intervention is to provide information to workers once their wages get credited into their accounts. Using administrative and survey data, its impact on delays in wage payments and days of work along with the awareness levels
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Minimum Wages around Birth and Child Health The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Muhammad Farhan Majid, Jere R Behrman
This paper studies the effects of minimum wages in Indonesia around the time of birth on child height-for-age Z scores (HAZ) up to five years of age. Using variations in annual fluctuations in real minimum wages in different Indonesian provinces, it finds that children exposed to increases in minimum wages in their birth years have higher HAZ in the first five years of their lives. The estimated impacts
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Hard and Soft Skills in Vocational Training: Experimental Evidence from Colombia The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Adriana Kugler, Mikko Silliman
This paper studies the effects of an oversubscribed job-training program on skills and labor-market outcomes using both survey and administrative data. Overall, vocational training improves labor-market outcomes, particularly by increasing formal employment. A second round of randomization evaluates how applicants to otherwise similar job-training programs are affected by the extent that hard versus
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Taking Cover: Human Capital Accumulation in the Presence of Shocks and Health Insurance The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-03-04 Paulino Font-Gilabert
Using the expansion of a large-scale health-insurance program in Mexico and variation in local rainfall levels, this study explores whether the program-induced increase in healthcare coverage protected the cognitive attainment of primary school children in the event of adverse rainfall shocks. Results show that the universalization of healthcare mitigated the negative effect of atypical rainfall on
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The Economic Impact of Deepening Trade Agreements The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-03-04 Lionel Fontagné, Nadia Rocha, Michele Ruta, Gianluca Santoni
This paper explores the economic impacts of preferential trade agreements, conditional on their level of ambition. It clusters 278 agreements, encompassing 910 provisions over 18 policy areas and estimates the trade elasticity for the different clusters. These elasticities are used in a series of general-equilibrium counterfactual situations for endowment economies, revealing that deepening existing
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The Double Dividend of a Joint Tariff and VAT Reform: Evidence from Iran The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Kowsar Yousefi, Mohammad Vesal
This paper provides empirical evidence on a novel complementarity between VAT and trade taxes. Downstream domestic firms require VAT receipts from importers to claim VAT on purchases, increasing incentives for honest reporting of imports. Trade gap, the difference between mirror and domestic trade reports in Iran at 6-digit HS disaggregation, is used to measure this complementarity. Iran introduced
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Class Size and Learning: Has India Spent Too Much on Reducing Class Size? The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Sandip Datta, Geeta Gandhi Kingdon
Whether class-size reductions improve student learning outcomes is an important policy question for India. This paper investigates the issue using a credible identification strategy to address the endogeneity of class size. Pupil fixed effects combined with value-added estimation show no significant relationship between class size and student achievement, which suggests that under current teaching
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The Distribution of Effort: Physical Activity, Gender Roles, and Bargaining Power in an Agrarian Setting The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Jed Friedman, Isis Gaddis, Talip Kilic, Antonio Martuscelli, Amparo Palacios-Lopez, Alberto Zezza
Physical effort is a primary component in models of economic behavior. However, applications that measure effort are historically scarce. This paper assesses the differences in physical activity between men and women through wearable accelerometers and uses these activity measures as a proxy for physical effort. Crucially, the accelerometer-generated data measures the level of physical activity associated
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Gender Differences in Informal Labor-Market Resilience The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-12-26 Morgan Hardy, Erin Litzow, Jamie McCasland, Gisella Kagy
This paper reports on the universe of garment-making-firm owners in a Ghanaian district capital during the COVID-19 crisis. By July 2020, 80 percent of both male- and female-owned firms were operational. However, pre-pandemic data show that selection into persistent closure differs by gender. Consistent with a “cleansing effect” of recessions and highlighting the presence of marginal female entrepreneurs
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Method Matters: The Underreporting of Intimate Partner Violence The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Claire Cullen
This paper analyzes the magnitude and predictors of misreporting on intimate partner violence. Women in Nigeria were randomly assigned to answer questions using either an indirect method (list experiment) that gives respondents anonymity, or the standard, direct face-to-face method. Intimate partner violence rates were up to 35 percent greater when measured using the list method than the direct method
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Legal Bans, Female Genital Cutting, and Education: Evidence from Senegal The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Jorge García-Hombrados, Edgar Salgado
A law that banned the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) in Senegal in 1999 reduced its prevalence and increased educational investments in girls. These results are not driven by mechanisms like health, broader changes in empowerment, or child marriage. Suggestive evidence indicates that results could be driven by some parents of future brides reacting to the increase in the cost of FGC caused
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The Timing of Elections and Neonatal Mortality: Evidence from India The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-10-08 Shampa Bhattacharjee
This paper uncovers evidence of political cycles in developmental outcomes in the Indian context. Comparing children born to the same mother, it shows that children born 0–11 months before scheduled state legislative assembly elections have a significantly lower risk of neonatal mortality. The effect of being born just before elections is higher in politically more competitive regions. The paper provides
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Nowcasting Global Poverty The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Daniel Gerszon Mahler, R Andrés Castañeda Aguilar, David Newhouse
This paper evaluates different methods for nowcasting country-level poverty rates, including methods that apply statistical learning to large-scale country-level data obtained from the World Development Indicators and Google Earth Engine. The methods are evaluated by withholding measured poverty rates and determining how accurately the methods predict the held-out data. A simple approach that scales
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Direct Shock Experience vs. Tangential Shock Exposure: Indirect Effects of Flood Shocks on Well-Being and Preferences The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-08-31 Wiebke Stein, Reinhard A Weisser
With extreme weather events on the rise, the question of how witnessing adverse weather events may affect individuals’ perception, and consequently their subjective well-being, gains in relevance. To identify events that have been witnessed, i.e., tangential exposure to a weather shock, satellite-based data on flooding is linked to an extensive household panel survey from rural Southeast Asia. Contrasting
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Fertility Following Natural Disasters and Epidemics in Africa The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-08-09 Johannes Norling
This paper uses dozens of large-scale household surveys to measure average changes in fertility following hundreds of droughts, floods, earthquakes, tropical cyclones, other storms, and epidemics in Africa between 1980 and 2016. Droughts are the largest and longest-lasting type of disaster on average, and fertility decreases by between 3.5 and 6.8 percent in the five years after droughts. Fertility
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Technology, Skills, and Globalization: Explaining International Differences in Routine and Nonroutine Work Using Survey Data The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-06-20 Piotr Lewandowski, Albert Park, Wojciech Hardy, Yang Du, Saier Wu
The shift from routine work to nonroutine cognitive work is a key feature of labor markets globally, but there is little evidence on the extent to which tasks differ among workers performing the same jobs in different countries. This paper constructs survey-based measures of routine task intensity (RTI) of jobs consistent with those based on the U.S. O*NET database for workers in 47 countries. It confirms
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Investment Treaties, Local Institutions and Policies in the Global Land Rush The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Sebastian Anti
Abstract Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) are large tracts of land purchased or leased in low- and middle-income countries by multinational firms. This study examines whether these firms respond to the presence of bilateral investment treaties (BITs), whether BITs reinforce or undermine institutions in this process, and whether these firms respond to recipient-country environmental regulations
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Jobs and Productivity Growth in Global Value Chains: New Evidence for Twenty-five Low- and Middle-Income Countries The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Stefan Pahl,Marcel P Timmer,Reitze Gouma,Pieter J Woltjer
Abstract Using newly developed data, the evolution of job and productivity growth in global value chains (GVCs) is analyzed for 25 low- and middle-income countries. GVC jobs are found to be more productive than non-GVC jobs. Their share in the total labor force is small, in particular for low-income countries. Growth in GVC jobs varies widely across countries in the period 2000–2014. Part of this can
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What Do Local Government Education Managers Do to Boost Learning Outcomes? The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Jacobus Cilliers,Eric Dunford,James Habyarimana
Abstract Recent public sector reforms have shifted responsibility for public service delivery to local governments, yet little is known about how their management practices or behavior shape performance. This study reports on a comprehensive management survey of district education bureaucrats and their staff that was conducted in every district in Tanzania, and employs flexible machine-learning techniques
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Unambiguous Trends Combining Absolute and Relative Income Poverty: New Results and Global Application The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-12-02 Benoit Decerf, Mery Ferrando
Over the period 1990–2015, many countries experienced a reduction in extreme absolute poverty and an increase in relative poverty. As a result, the global trend of “overall” income poverty, which combines absolute and relative poverty, may depend on arbitrary normative choices such as the priority given to the absolutely poor over the relatively poor. This article proves that, if one assumes that an
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The Role of Income Inequality for Poverty Reduction The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-11-24 Katy Bergstrom
This paper approximates the identity that links growth in mean incomes and changes in the distribution of relative incomes to reductions in absolute poverty and examines the role of income inequality for poverty reduction. Under the assumption that income is log-normally distributed, we show that we can approximate this identity well. We find that the inequality elasticity of poverty reduction is larger
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Knowledge and Adoption of Complex Agricultural Technologies: Evidence from an Extension Experiment The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-10-25 Denise Hörner, Adrien Bouguen, Markus Frölich, Meike Wollni
In most of Sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural extension models have become more decentralized and participatory and thus rely on effective farmer-to-farmer learning, while increasingly including nontraditional forms of education. At the same time, agricultural technologies become more complex and are now often promoted as integrated packages, which are likely to increase the complexity of the diffusion
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Unfolding Trade Effect in Two Margins of Informality. The Peruvian Case The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-09-15 Camila Cisneros-Acevedo
This paper studies the effect of an increase in import competition on informality along two margins. It considers the extensive margin, where workers are hired by unregistered employers, and the intensive margin, where even though jobs are carried out by registered firms, employees are off the books. Peru’s relentless informal employment and its unprecedented trade-driven growth provides an ideal case
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The Intergenerational Effects of Economic Sanctions The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-09-10 Safoura Moeeni
While economic sanctions are successful in achieving political goals, they can hurt the civilian population. These negative effects could be even more detrimental and long lasting for future generations. This study estimates the effects of economic sanctions on children’s education by exploiting the United Nations sanctions imposed on Iran in 2006. Using the variation in the strength of sanctions across
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Urban Agglomeration and Firm Innovation: Evidence from Asia The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-09-08 Liming Chen, Rana Hasan, Yi Jiang
This paper examines the relationship between urban agglomeration and firm innovation using a recently developed dataset that consistently measures city boundaries across Asia together with geo-referenced firm-level data. It finds that the spatial distribution of innovation by firms is highly concentrated within countries. Further, firms in larger cities have substantially higher propensities to introduce
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Opposition Media, State Censorship, and Political Accountability: Evidence from Chavez’s Venezuela The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-09-06 Brian Knight, Ana Tribin
This study investigates the effects of state censorship in the context of the 2007 government closing of RCTV, a popular opposition television channel in Venezuela. Some parts of the country had access to a second opposition channel, Globovision, while other parts completely lost access to opposition television. The first finding, based upon ratings data, is that viewership fell on the progovernment
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Consumption Subaggregates Should Not Be Used to Measure Poverty The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-08-16 Luc Christiaensen, Ethan Ligon, Thomas Pave Sohnesen
Frequent measurement of poverty is challenging because measurement often relies on complex and expensive expenditure surveys that try to measure expenditures on a comprehensive consumption aggregate. This paper investigates the use of consumption “subaggregates” instead. The use of consumption subaggregates is theoretically justified if and only if all Engel curves are linear for any realization of
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A Tale of Two Programs: Assessing Treatment and Control in NREGA Studies The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-08-11 Girish Bahal
This article revisits impact evaluation studies on the largest public workfare in the world, NREGA. In an environment where randomization is not feasible, I show why an impact evaluation exercise on NREGA should acknowledge the existence of an older program, SGRY. Using novel district-level expenditure data on SGRY, this article shows how ignoring the older program is likely to underestimate the general
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The Macroeconomy After Tariffs The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-07-28 Davide Furceri, Swarnali A Hannan, Jonathan D Ostry, Andrew K Rose
What does the macroeconomy look like in the aftermath of tariff changes? This study estimates impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries from 1963 to 2014. Tariff increases are associated with persistent, economically and statistically significant declines in domestic output and productivity, as well as higher unemployment and inequality
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Poverty from Space: Using High Resolution Satellite Imagery for Estimating Economic Well-being The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-07-13 Ryan Engstrom, Jonathan Hersh, David Newhouse
Can features extracted from high spatial resolution satellite imagery accurately estimate poverty and economic well-being? The present study investigates this question by extracting both object and texture features from satellite images of Sri Lanka. These features are used to estimate poverty rates and average expected log consumption taken from small-area estimates derived from census data, for 1
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Decomposing Learning Inequalities in East Africa: How Much Does Sorting Matter? The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-07-04 Paul Anand, Jere R Behrman, Hai-Anh H Dang, Sam Jones
Inequalities in learning opportunities arise from both household- and school-related factors. Although these factors are unlikely to be independent, few studies have considered the extent to which sorting between schools and households might aggravate educational inequalities. To fill this gap, this article presents a novel variance decomposition, which is then applied to data from over one million
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Does Local Female Political Representation Empower Women to Run for Higher Office? Evidence from State and National Legislatures in India The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-06-30 Ryan Brown, Hani Mansour, Stephen D O’Connell
Does increasing the number of women in career stages that precede high-level positions affect female representation at the top of the career ladder? State legislature elections narrowly won by female candidates in India are exploited to examine the effect of expanding the pipeline of women in local politics on subsequent female representation and success in national legislature elections. For each
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Wealth Inequality in South Africa, 1993–2017 The World Bank Economic Review (IF 2.622) Pub Date : 2021-06-29 Aroop Chatterjee, Léo Czajka, Amory Gethin
This article estimates the distribution of personal wealth in South Africa by combining microdata covering the universe of income tax returns, household surveys, and macroeconomic balance sheet statistics. South Africa is characterized by unparalleled levels of wealth concentration. The top 10 percent own 86 percent of aggregate wealth and the top 0.1 percent close to one-third. The top 0.01 percent