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作者：Mookherjee, Dilip; Napel, Stefan
作者单位：Boston University; University of Bayreuth
摘要：We study efficiency and distributional effects of conditioning transfers on educational investments by parents, in an OLG model with missing financial markets and heterogeneity of learning ability. Conditional cash transfers (CCT) can be designed to generate a Pareto improvement relative to either laissez faire, or unconditional transfers such as universal basic income proposals. This applies irrespective of whether the status quo involves underinvestment or overinvestment in education from a ...
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作者：Arouna, Aminou; Michler, Jeffrey D.; Lokossou, Jourdain C.
作者单位：CGIAR; Africa Rice Center; University of Arizona
摘要：Contract farming has emerged as a popular mechanism to encourage vertical coordination in developing country agriculture. Yet, there is a lack of consensus on its ability to spur structural transformation in rural economies. We present results from a field experiment on contract farming for rice production in Benin. While all contracts have positive effects on welfare and productivity measures, we find that the simplest contract has impacts nearly as large as contracts with additional attribut...
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作者：McGavock, Tamara
作者单位：Grinnell College
摘要：Child marriage is still common in the developing world: in 2012, one in three women was married by age 18, with more than 10% married before age 15. Beginning in 2000, Ethiopia's semi-autonomous regions raised the legal minimum age of marriage from 15 to 18. This study leverages the natural experiment arising from the staggered roll out of the policy in a difference-in-differences and event study framework. The results suggest that the reform delayed women's marriage, and in particular delayed...
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作者：Bahety, Girija; Bauhoff, Sebastian; Patel, Dev; Potter, James
作者单位：Tufts University; Tufts University; Harvard University; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Harvard University
摘要：We conduct an adaptive randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of a SMS-based information campaign on the adoption of social distancing and handwashing in rural Bihar, India, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. We test 10 arms that vary in delivery timing and message framing, changing content to highlight gains or losses for either one's own family or community. We identify the optimal treatment separately for each targeted behavior by adaptively allocating shares across arms ove...
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作者：Balima, Hippolyte W.; Sokolova, Anna
作者单位：Universite de Orleans; Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE); University of Nevada Reno; HSE University (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
摘要：We examine 994 estimates of the effects of IMF programs on economic growth as reported by 36 studies. The mean reported effect is positive, but the estimates vary widely. We use meta-regression analysis to disentangle sources of this variation, addressing model uncertainty with Bayesian Model Averaging and LASSO. We find that estimates vary systematically depending on data and methods employed by the researchers. Reported effects of IMF programs tend to be more positive for samples that includ...
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作者：Aggarwal, Shilpa
作者单位：Indian School of Business (ISB)
摘要：Despite demand-stimulation efforts, coverage rates of many essential health services remain low in developing countries, suggesting that there may be binding supply constraints, such as poor access to healthcare facilities. This paper utilizes quasi-random variation in road-pavement intensity to study the impact of improved access on adoption of reproductive health services. I find that road construction led to more institutional antenatal visits and deliveries, which translated into better me...
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作者：Maffioli, Elisa M.
作者单位：University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
摘要：This paper investigates whether political incentives affect the government's response during a health epidemic and the subsequent effects on citizens' voting behavior. Leveraging novel data, I study this question in the context of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia. The national incumbent government appropriately prioritized the allocation of resources to villages affected by the epidemic. By building a spatiotemporal epidemiological model that estimates the ex-ante optimal allocation of relie...
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作者：Dutta, Indranil; Nogales, Ricardo; Yalonetzky, Gaston
作者单位：University of Manchester; University of Oxford; University of Leeds
摘要：Multidimensional poverty measures have become a standard feature in poverty assessments. A large and growing body of work uses endogenous (data driven) weights to compute multidimensional poverty. We demonstrate that broad classes of endogenous weights violate key properties of poverty indices such as monotonicity and subgroup consistency, without which poverty evaluation and policy targeting are seriously compromised. Using data from Ecuador and Uganda we show that these violations are widesp...
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作者：Basu, Arnab K.; Chau, Nancy H.; Soundararajan, Vidhya
作者单位：Cornell University; Indian Institute of Management (IIM System); Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
摘要：Fixed-term labor contracting has increasingly replaced regular open-ended employment in developing countries. What justifies its emergence? What determines its intensity? What policy responses are appropriate, if any? In a two-tiered task-based model of the labor market, we demonstrate that within establishments, fixed-term contracting can indeed co-exist with open-ended efficiency wage contracts as it enables firms to enforce regular worker discipline at strictly lower cost. Furthermore, the ...
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作者：Shi, Xiangyu; Xi, Tianyang; Zhang, Xiaobo; Zhang, Yifan
作者单位：Yale University; Peking University; CGIAR; International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); Chinese University of Hong Kong
摘要：This paper studies the pattern of interregional investment after bureaucratic transfers across Chinese cities. Using the administrative records of business registration, we find that the transfer of a local leader between prefecture cities is associated with about 3% increase in interregional investment along the direction of transfer. The comoving firms purchase larger parcels of land and at lower prices. They also exhibit a higher likelihood of exiting when the patrons leave the office. Como...
