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作者：Bai, Ying
作者单位：Chinese University of Hong Kong
摘要：This study uses 1899-1908 prefecture-level panel data to assess how the likelihood of passing the civil service examination affected modernization before and after the examination system's abolition. Because higher quotas were assigned to prefectures with an agricultural tax of over 150,000 piculs, we use a regression discontinuity design to generate an instrument that resolves potential endogeneity and ensures robust results. We find that following abolition, prefectures with higher quotas of...
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作者：Dreher, Axel; Lang, Valentin F.; Richert, Katharina
作者单位：Ruprecht Karls University Heidelberg; University of Zurich; University of Mannheim
摘要：Much of the International Finance Corporation's (IFC) lending benefits private companies from rich countries and supports projects in middle-income countries. Large corporations such as Lidl or Movenpick have received its loans for highly profitable investments. This contrasts to some extent with the IFC's official mandate, which is to finance poverty-reducing projects for which private capital is not available on reasonable terms. Investigating a potential driver of this mismatch, we argue th...
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作者：Kandpal, Eeshani; Baylis, Kathy
作者单位：The World Bank; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
摘要：In patriarchal societies, sticky norms affect married women's social circles, their autonomy, and the outcomes of intra-household bargaining. This paper uses primary data on women's social networks in Uttarakhand, India; the modal woman has only three friends, and over 80 percent do not have any friends of another caste. This paper examines the effect of a shock to friends' empowerment on a woman's autonomy, specifically physical mobility, access to social safety nets, and employment outside t...
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作者：Bauchet, Jonathan; Morduch, Jonathan
作者单位：Purdue University System; Purdue University; New York University
摘要：Risk is pervasive in low-income economies, but insurance markets tend to be under-developed and demand for existing products is often low and poorly understood. Usually, customers must buy insurance by making a single lump-sum payment. We study a popular life insurance product sold by Mexico's leading microfinance institution. We exploit a large-scale natural experiment involving 200,000 poor female microcredit customers and show that demand increased by 59-74 percent when customers were allow...
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作者：Fallah, Belal; Krafft, Caroline; Wahba, Jackline
作者单位：Palestine Polytechnic University; Saint Catherine University; University of Southampton
摘要：Starting in 2011, the Syrian conflict caused a large influx of refugees into Jordan. In 2015, there were an estimated 1.3 million Syrians in a country with just 6.6 million Jordanians. This paper investigates the impact of the Syrian refugee influx on the Jordanian labor market. Panel data from 2010 to 2016 combined with information on where the refugee influx was concentrated allow us to identify the impact of refugees on Jordanians' labor market outcomes. Overall, we find that Jordanians liv...
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作者：Pan, Yao; Singhal, Saurabh
作者单位：Aalto University; Lancaster University
摘要：Can agricultural development programs improve health-related outcomes? We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of a large-scale agricultural extension program in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility for the program reduced the proportion of household members with malaria by 8.9 percentage points, with children and pregnant women experiencing substantial improvements. An examination of the underlying mechanisms indicates that an increase in inc...
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作者：Rodriguez, Catherine; Saavedra, Juan E.
作者单位：Universidad de los Andes (Colombia); University of Southern California; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We report on a nationwide field experiment with a commercial bank in Colombia in which low-income youth (12 years old on average) who open new accounts are randomly assigned immediately after opening the account to control or to receive one of three twelve-month text-messaging campaigns: i) monthly savings reminders, ii) semimonthly reminders, iii) monthly action-oriented financial education messages. Relative to control, monthly and semimonthly reminders groups increase account balances durin...
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作者：Cassan, Guilhem
作者单位：University of Namur
摘要：This paper studies the impact of India's affirmative action policies for Scheduled Castes on educational attainment. Using a plausibly exogenous variation, I show that affirmative action increases educational attainment. The main improvements are in literacy and secondary schooling and there is only small evidence of increases in higher education. The benefits are not distributed evenly across genders: only males show an increase in education (in literacy, primary and secondary completion). In...
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作者：Bosch, Mariano; Schady, Norbert
作者单位：Inter-American Development Bank
摘要：We study the impact of welfare payments in Ecuador on the probability that adults work, and on whether they are employed in the formal or informal sectors. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that welfare was limited to individuals below a cutoff value on a household poverty score. We find no evidence that transfers discouraged work. However, among women, welfare payments led to reductions in social security contributions (which are mandated for salaried workers), although the magnit...
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作者：von der Goltz, Jan; Barnwal, Prabhat
作者单位：The World Bank; Michigan State University
摘要：We assess health and wealth impacts of mineral mining using micro-data from about 800 mines in 44 developing countries. Gains in asset wealth (0.3 standard deviations) coexist with a higher incidence of health conditions linked to heavy metal toxicity: anemia among women (ten percentage points), and stunting in young children (five percentage points). Consistent results emerge from a range of distinct identification strategies. Two difference-in-difference tests exploit information on mineral ...
