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作者：Demirguec-Kunt, Asli; Cordova, Ernesto Lopez; Peria, Maria Soledad Martinez; Woodruff, Christopher
作者单位：The World Bank; Inter-American Development Bank; University of California System; University of California San Diego
摘要：Despite the importance of remittances to developing countries, their impact on banking sector breadth and depth in recipient countries has been largely unexplored. We examine this topic using municipality-level data on the fraction of households receiving remittances and on measures of banking breadth and depth for Mexico. We find that remittances are strongly associated with greater banking breadth and depth, increasing the number of branches and accounts per capita and the amount of deposits...
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作者：Cull, Robert; Spreng, Connor P.
作者单位：The World Bank; The World Bank
摘要：Profitability improvements after the privatization of a large state-owned bank might come at the expense of reduced access to financial services for some groups, especially the rural poor. The privatization of Tanzania's National Bank of Commerce provides a unique episode for studying this issue. The bank was split into the new National Bank of Commerce, a commercial bank that assumed most of the original bank's assets and liabilities, and the National Microfinance Bank, which assumed most of ...
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作者：Besedes, Tibor; Prusa, Thomas J.
作者单位：Rutgers University System; Rutgers University New Brunswick; University System of Georgia; Georgia Institute of Technology; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We investigate and compare countries' export growth based on their performance at the extensive and intensive export margins. Our empirical approach is motivated by an extension to the Melitz (2003) model of heterogeneous firms in which exporters are subject to a one-time sunk cost and also a per-period fixed cost. With imperfect information a firm may enter export markets but shortly exit when it learns its per-period fixed costs. We apply this insight to disaggregated export data and confirm...
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作者：de Brauw, Alan; Hoddinott, John
作者单位：CGIAR; International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
摘要：A growing body of evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs can have strong, positive effects on a range of welfare indicators for poor households in developing countries. However, there is little evidence about how important each component of these programs is towards achieving these outcomes. This paper tests the importance of conditionality on one specific outcome related to human capital formation, school enrollment, using data collected during the evaluation of Mexic...
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作者：Rohner, Dominic
作者单位：University of Zurich
摘要：Social tensions impede social cohesion and public goods provision, and can be a driving force for more serious conflicts such as civil wars. Surprisingly, the emergence of social tensions has been studied only rarely in the literature. In the present contribution a game-theoretic model highlights how reputation concerns and the structure of group cleavages matter for the emergence of social tensions. In particular, the respective effects of ethnic fractionalization, polarization and segregatio...
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作者：Luoto, Jani
作者单位：University of Helsinki
摘要：In this paper, Bayesian methods and the Finnish aggregate infrastructure capital series from 1860 to 2003 are used to explore how government infrastructure policy affects long-run output growth. We use Finnish data, since to the best of our knowledge the Finnish land and water construction investments series is the best available sufficiently long time series on aggregate infrastructure investments. The Finnish data provide strong and robust evidence indicating that permanent changes in govern...
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作者：Sharif, Iffath A.
作者单位：The World Bank
摘要：The impact of political competition on ethnic discrimination remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this paper explores the relationship between the level of political competition and the probability of receiving government transfers among ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka in the run up to the national elections of 2000. The paper shows that making politicians dependent on the votes of members of ethnic groups other their own can encourage moderation in discriminatory practices towards ...
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作者：Baez, Javier E.
作者单位：The World Bank
摘要：In early 1994, Kagera - a region in northwestern Tanzania - was flooded by more than 500,000 refugees fleeing from the genocides of Burundi and Rwanda. I use this population shock and a series of topographic barriers that resulted in variation in refugee intensity to investigate the short- and long-run causal effects of hosting refugees on outcomes of local children. This strategy provides evidence of adverse impacts over one year after the shock: a worsening of children's anthropometrics (0.3...
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作者：Christiaensen, Luc; Demery, Lionel; Kuhl, Jesper
摘要：The role of agriculture in development remains much debated. This paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty, as opposed to growth alone. The contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth performance, its indirect impact on growth in other sectors, the extent to which poor people participate in the sector, and the size of the sector in the overall economy. Bringing together these different effects using cross-country econometric evidence in...
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作者：Helmers, Christian; Patnam, Manasa
作者单位：University of Cambridge; University of Oxford
摘要：Building on recent advances in the literature and using a rich data set for two cohorts of children aged between one and twelve for Andhra Pradesh, India, we investigate the determinants of children's cognitive as well as non-cognitive skills. We find evidence of self-productivity for cognitive skills and cross-productivity effects from cognitive on non-cognitive skills. Moreover, we demonstrate that parental investment has contemporaneously positive effects on skill levels for all age groups....
