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作者：Barrett, Philip; Appendino, Maximiliano; Nguyen, Kate; Miranda, Jorge de Leon
作者单位：International Monetary Fund; International Monetary Fund; INSEAD Business School; Inter-American Development Bank
摘要：We present a new index of social unrest based on counts of relevant media reports, covering 130 countries monthly starting in 1986. Spikes in the index identify major events, which match event timelines from external sources for four major regional waves of social unrest. We assess our index against others and show it performs as well as the next best alternative but with superior coverage. Social unrest is associated with a 3 percentage point increase in the frequency of social unrest domesti...
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作者：Rustagi, Devesh; Kroell, Markus
作者单位：University of Nottingham; Brown University; University of Bonn
摘要：There is astounding variation in product quality sold in markets even when quality is difficult to ascertain and rules are poorly enforced. We investigate whether sellers differ in innate honesty (incur private cost to provide good quality) and whether this explains the variation in quality. Our study takes place in milk markets in India, where milkmen collude on price, customer rarely switch, and it is difficult to establish reputation. We invite milkmen to take part in a novel behavioral exp...
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作者：Ayalew, Hailemariam; Chamberlin, Jordan; Newman, Carol
作者单位：University of Oxford; CGIAR; International Maize & Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT); Trinity College Dublin
摘要：Smallholder farmers in Africa typically only have access to blanket fertilizer recommendations which are defined over very broad areas and may not be optimal for local production conditions. The response to such recommendations has generally been poor. Using a randomized control trial in Ethiopia, we explore whether targeted extension advice leads farmers to align fertilizer usage to the recommended levels and whether this impacts productivity. We also consider whether coupling the targeted in...
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作者：Tagliati, Federico
作者单位：Banco de Espana
摘要：This paper proposes an approach for ex-ante welfare analysis under in-kind transfers based on demand system estimation and construction of virtual prices (i.e., the prices at which beneficiaries would be as well off as with the subsidy). As an application of this approach, I study a program which randomly transferred either a food basket, procured at a discount in wholesale markets, or an equal-cost cash transfer to poor households in rural Mexico. I find large welfare-destroying distortions f...
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作者：Cao, Jiarui; Xu, Yiqing; Zhang, Chuanchuan
作者单位：Central University of Finance & Economics; Stanford University; Zhejiang University
摘要：This paper examines the role of social capital, embedded in kinship-based clans, in disaster relief during China's Great Famine (1958-1961). Using a county-year panel and a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the rise in the mortality rate during the famine years is significantly less in counties with a higher clan density. Analysis using a nationally representative household survey corroborates this finding. Investigation of potential mechanisms suggests that social capital's imp...
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作者：Baird, Sarah; Panlilio, Raphael; Seager, Jennifer; Smith, Stephanie; Wydick, Bruce
作者单位：George Washington University; Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA); University of San Francisco
摘要：Nearly 5.6 million Syrian refugees have been displaced by the country's civil war, of which roughly half are children. A digital analysis of features in children's drawings potentially represents a rapid, cost-effective, and non-invasive method for collecting information about children's mental health. Using data collected from free drawings and self-portraits from 2480 Syrian refugee children in Jordan across two distinct datasets, we use LASSO machine-learning techniques to understand the re...
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作者：Aflagah, Kodjo; Bernard, Tanguy; Viceisza, Angelino
作者单位：Universite de Bordeaux; Spelman College; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Most developing-country farms are small and engage in cooperative agriculture. Prior literature has argued that mechanisms aimed at facilitating smallholder coordination such as cooperatives are central to stimulating market participation. At the same time, cooperatives have not always been able to engage in collective action. In this paper, we conduct neutrally framed coordination games and a natural field experiment to test the effect of cheap talk among members of groundnut-producing cooper...
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作者：Friedt, Felix L.; Toner-Rodgers, Aidan
作者单位：Macalester College; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - New York
摘要：This paper studies the effects of natural disasters on foreign direct investment, considering the case of India. We document large and persistent investment reductions in affected regions following a disaster as well as lasting positive spillovers into otherwise unaffected Indian regions. Intra-national relocations account for more than two-thirds of the losses in affected areas, explaining the puzzlingly small country-level findings of previous works. Furthermore, we show that these investmen...
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作者：Ahlin, Christian; Debrah, Godwin
作者单位：Michigan State University; University of Ghana
摘要：Group-based lending with joint liability has been a major tool microfinance institutions (MFIs) have employed to improve lending feasibility. The related theoretical literature typically assumes borrowers face independent risk. This paper examines how covariate risk affects the usefulness of joint liability lending, in the hidden-information setting of Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) and Ghatak (2000). In a benchmark setting where all agents face the same degree of covariate risk, greater correlatio...
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作者：Banerjee, Abhijit; Karlan, Dean; Osei, Robert; Trachtman, Hannah; Udry, Christopher
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research; Northwestern University; University of Ghana; Hebrew University of Jerusalem
摘要：A multi-faceted program comprising a grant of productive assets, training, unconditional cash transfers, coaching, and savings has been found to build sustainable income for those in extreme poverty. We focus on two important questions: whether a mere grant of productive assets would generate similar impacts (it does not), and whether access to a savings account with a deposit collection service would generate similar impacts (it does, but they are short-lived).
