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作者:Gust, Sarah; Hanushek, Eric A.; Woessmann, Ludger
作者单位:Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; University of Munich; IZA Institute Labor Economics; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Munich; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; IZA Institute Labor Economics
摘要:How far is the world away from ensuring that every child obtains the basic skills needed to be competitive in a modern economy? And what would accomplishing this mean for world development? We provide new approaches for estimating the lack of basic skills that allow mapping achievement across countries of the world onto a common (PISA) scale. We then estimate the share of children not achieving basic skills for 159 countries that cover 98% of world population and 99% of world GDP. We find that...
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作者:Hernandez-Agramonte, Juan Manuel; Namen, Olga; Naslund-Hadley, Emma; Biehl, Maria Loreto
作者单位:Inter-American Development Bank
摘要:Using a randomized field experiment in Costa Rica, we estimate the effect of providing parents of preschool students with regular text messages offering ways to engage their children in educational activities at home. After 15 weeks of intervention, the cognitive skills of children whose families were assigned to the program were 0.11-0.12 standard deviations higher than the control group. We find suggestive evidence that the effect was driven by an increase in parents' involvement as they con...
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作者:Grimm, Michael; Soubeiga, Sidiki; Weber, Michael
作者单位:University of Passau; Leibniz Association; DIW Berlin - Deutsches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung; IZA Institute Labor Economics; Leibniz Association; DIW Berlin - Deutsches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung; The World Bank; The World Bank
摘要:We used a randomized controlled trial to compare matching grants earmarked for technical training and consulting services with more flexible cash grants and with a control group. The experiment was implemented in a semi-urban and rural fragile setting where subsidizing innovative activities might be particularly important. Firms were selected on the basis of a business plan competition. After two years, beneficiaries of cash grants showed higher survival rates, improved business practices, a h...
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作者:Augsburg, Britta; Foster, Andrew; Johnson, Terence; Lipscomb, Molly
作者单位:University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Brown University; University of Virginia
摘要:Sanitation is a public good, the responsibility for which is shared between households and the government. Interventions in the sector, therefore, must be designed with an eye toward reducing crowd out. We discuss the new findings on sanitation provision from the 12 papers in this special issue in the context of a simple model of household choice of levels of sanitation investment in the face of joint responsibility between the government and households over sanitation. The model provides micr...
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作者:Han, Yi; Wu, Mingqin
作者单位:Renmin University of China; Wuhan University
摘要:This paper examines the impact of a policy reform in China that removed inter -regional market barriers by incorporating counties into larger prefecture-level divisions. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, we compare the economic performance of incorporated counties before and after the reform to two control groups: counties that applied for incorporation but were unsuccessful, and counties that were incorporated at a later time. Our findings suggest that the reform had an immediat...
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作者:Geng, Hao; Shi, Ce Matthew
作者单位:Chinese University of Hong Kong; Chinese University of Hong Kong
摘要:This paper investigates the effect of policy-induced market incentives on pharmaceutical innovation in the context of developing countries, where substantial health challenges persist but research and development (R&D) efforts remain limited. We exploit the quasi-experimental setting of a major reform in China's public vaccine system, which involved expanding vaccine coverage while imposing price controls on affected products. Using newly collected data on vaccine clinical trials and revenues,...
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作者:Fontagne, Lionel; Limardi, Michela
作者单位:European Central Bank; Bank of France; Paris School of Economics; Universite de Lille; heSam Universite; Universite Pantheon-Sorbonne; Universite Paris Cite
摘要:Can NGOs contribute to the implementation of Labor Laws in a developing country? We exploit as a quasinatural experiment the renegotiation of the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) between the US and Indonesia in 1994, which induced the Indonesian government to raise the level of the legal minimum wage. Using data from Indonesian manufacturing firms, a diff-in-diff analysis and an event study show that the activism of workers' rights groups helped increase firm-level average wages up to t...
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作者:Baird, Sarah; Mcintosh, Craig; Ozler, Berk; Pape, Utz
作者单位:George Washington University; University of California System; University of California San Diego; The World Bank
摘要:We use a set of randomized experiments to examine the impact of a group business development program implemented by the Tanzanian government, along with a set of complementary training and cash transfer interventions targeted to vulnerable households in rural areas. In contrast with much of the recent literature, we find little effect of the business development program. While most enterprises remain operative three years after formation, even our highest estimates of effective wage rates sugg...
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作者:Lebow, Jeremy
作者单位:The World Bank
摘要:Between 2015-2019, approximately 1.8 million Venezuelans fled an economic and political crisis into neighboring Colombia. Despite being well-educated on average, these migrants disproportionately entered occupations that typically employ less-educated Colombians. I use a model of labor demand with imperfect substitutability between migrants and natives to study the effect of migrant occupational downgrading on native wages and inequality. Counterfactual scenarios reveal that migrant downgradin...
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作者:Novella, Rafael; Rosas-Shady, David; Freund, Richard
作者单位:University of London; University College London; Inter-American Development Bank; University of Cape Town
摘要:Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are frequently viewed as a tool for democratizing education and job training. However, their effectiveness is largely untested. We report on the first randomized evaluation of a job training program offering cost-free access to curated, short Coursera MOOCs and certificates. We find low course completion rates (10%), with males and wealthier individuals more likely to complete a course. Personalized reminders did not increase treatment take-up over a simple,...