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作者:Datta, Saugato
摘要:India's Golden Quadrilateral Program, a major highway project, aimed at improving the quality and width of existing highways connecting the four largest cities in India. It affected the quality of highways available to firms in cities that lay along the routes of the four upgraded highways, while leaving the quality of highways available to firms in other cities unaffected. This feature of the project allows for a difference-in-difference estimation strategy, where status on and off the improv...
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作者:Brueckner, Markus
作者单位:University of Adelaide
摘要:This paper exploits the significant response of real GDP growth of Sub-Saharan African countries to exogenous international commodity price and rainfall shocks to construct instrumental variables estimates of the tax revenue elasticity IV estimates yield that a 1% increase in GDP increases tax revenues by up to 2.5%. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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作者:Ravallion, Martin
作者单位:The World Bank
摘要:The 20th Human Development Report introduced a new version of its famous Human Development Index (HDI), which aggregates country-level attainments in life expectancy, schooling and income. The main change was to relax the past assumption of perfect substitutability between its components. Most users will not, however, realize that the new HDI has also greatly reduced its implicit weight on longevity in poor countries, relative to rich ones. By contrast, the new HDI's valuations of extra school...
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作者:Gertler, Paul J.; Patrinos, Harry Anthony; Rubio-Codina, Marta
作者单位:The World Bank; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要:We examine a very inexpensive program in Mexico that involves parents directly in the management of schools located in disadvantaged rural communities. The program, known as AGE, finances parent associations and motivates parental participation by involving them in the management of primary school grants. We find that AGE reduced grade failure by 7.4% and grade repetition by 5.5% in grades 1 through 3. However, while AGE was effective in poor communities, it had no effect in extremely poor com...
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作者:Berg, Andrew; Ostry, Jonathan D.; Zettelmeyer, Jeromin
作者单位:International Monetary Fund; European Bank of Reconstructon & Development
摘要:We identify structural breaks in economic growth in 140 countries and use these to define growth spells: periods of high growth preceded by an upbreak and ending either with a downbreak or with the end of the sample. Growth spells tend to be shorter in African and Latin American countries than elsewhere. We find evidence that growth duration is positively related to: the degree of equality of the income distribution; democratic institutions; export orientation (with higher propensities to expo...
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作者:de Mendonca, Helder Ferreira; de Guimaraes e Souza, Gustavo Jose
作者单位:Universidade Federal Fluminense; Universidade de Brasilia
摘要:Since the 1990s inflation targeting (IT) has been adopted by several central banks as a strategy for monetary policy. It is expected that the adoption of this monetary regime can reduce inflation and inflation volatility. This article is concerned with these issues and makes use of the Propensity Score Matching methodology on a sample of 180 countries for the period from 1990 to 2007. For analysis, the sample is split into two sets of countries (advanced and developing). The findings suggest t...
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作者:Tandon, Sharad
摘要:This paper uses the Indian tariff reforms of the early nineties to estimate how voters hurt by economic reforms respond. Regions more hurt by the tariff reform increased their support for both the party that initiated their suffering and parties with similar preferences in favor of poverty-centric policies. This response is surprisingly sophisticated, where voters did not simply punish incumbents for negative income shocks and correctly discounted initial anti-reform stances by opposition part...
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作者:Deininger, Klaus; Carletto, Calogero; Savastano, Sara; Muwonge, James
作者单位:The World Bank; University of Rome Tor Vergata
摘要:Although good and timely information on agricultural production is critical for policy-decisions, the quality of underlying data is often low and improving data quality could have high payoff. We use data from a production diary, administered concurrently with a standard household survey in Uganda to analyze the nature and incidence of responses, the magnitude of differences in reported outcomes, and factors that systematically affect these. Despite limited central supervision, diaries elicite...
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作者:Lybbert, Travis J.; McPeak, John
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Davis; Syracuse University
摘要:Most decisions involve variability in two dimensions: uncertainty across states of nature and fluctuations over time. The stakes involved in tradeoffs between these variability dimensions are especially high for the poor who have difficulty managing and recovering from shocks. We assume Epstein and Zin recursive preferences and estimate risk aversion and intertemporal substitution as distinct preferences using data from Kenyan herders. Results suggest that the assumption implicit in additive e...
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作者:Akresh, Richard; Lucchetti, Leonardo; Thirumurthy, Harsha
作者单位:University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
摘要:Conflict between and within countries can have lasting health and economic consequences, but identifying such effects can be empirically challenging. This paper uses household survey data from Eritrea to estimate the effect of exposure to the 1998-2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war on children's health. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the conflict's geographic extent and timing and the exposure of different birth cohorts to the fighting. The unique survey data include detail...