Economics: Research Guide

Conflict undermines development, while poverty, in turn, breeds conflict. Policy interventions such as cash transfers could lower engagement in conflict by raising poor households' welfare and productivity. However, cash transfers may also trigger appropriation or looting of cash or assets. The expansion of government programs may further attract attacks to undermine state legitimacy. To investigate the net effect across these forces, this paper studies the impact of cash transfers on conflict in Niger. The analysis relies on the large-scale randomization of a government-led cash transfer prog..

This paper reviews evidence on agent networks of microfinance institutions and other financial services providers, which have expanded rapidly in recent years in some low- and middle-income contexts. There is emerging evidence that clients become more financially active as a result of the convenience and security of transacting with agents, especially with respect to depositing, withdrawing, and transferring funds. Agent networks could also help increase the savings of low-income clients, although evidence suggests that commitment devices may also be required, and there is little evidence that..

How can regularization programs improve forced migrants’ resilience to shocks This paper leverages panel data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic to assess whether Venezuelan forced migrants who were eligible for a regularization program in Colombia were more resilient and less affected by the pandemic than similar but non-eligible forced migrants. The results indicate that access to the program promoted better health access for eligible migrants, facilitating adherence to prevention guidelines and increasing detection rates. Additionally, eligible migrants had better housing and labor co..

Despite the relevance of house prices for a variety of stakeholders as well as for macroeconomic and monetary policy making, reliable, publicly available house price data are largely absent in emerging markets and developing economies. Filling this void, this paper presents a systematic approach to collecting, analyzing, and assessing private property prices in emerging markets and developing economies. The paper uses data scraped from five countries’ largest real estate websites where private properties are listed for sale, to obtain price data and property attributes to establish a compreh..

This paper examines the welfare impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, using harmonized data from 343 high-frequency phone surveys conducted in 80 economies during 2020 and 2021, representing more than 2.5 billion people. The analysis focuses on the scarring effects of the initial losses of employment and income by examining their evolution over time across and within countries, as restrictions on mobility and economic activity were introduced and then gradually relaxed. The employment and welfare outcomes of some groups that were impacted to a greater degree initially—including women, informal w..

This paper assesses the reliability and validity of cognitive and socioemotional skills measures and investigates the correlation between schooling, skills acquisition, and labor earnings. The primary data from Pakistan incorporates two innovations related to measurement and sampling. On measurement, the paper develops and implements a battery of instruments intended to capture cognitive and socioemotional skills among young adults. On sampling, the paper uses a panel that follows respondents from their original rural locations in 2003 to their residences in 2018, a period over which 38 percen..

Foreign investors facilitate efficiency-enhancing structural change in the recipient countries. After countries liberalize their stock markets and allow foreign investors to acquire equity stakes in domestic firms, products that do not correspond to the liberalizing countries' comparative advantage disappear disproportionately faster from their export portfolios. At the same time, the overall long-term export performance of the liberalizing countries improves. Domestic stock market development does not have the same disciplining effect in terminating inefficient exports. Foreign investors thus..

Maternal work may affect children positively through increased household income, higher control of mothers over available income, and expansion of maternal information networks through work contacts and greater decision-making power of mothers as they become more economically empowered. However, maternal work may reduce maternal time spent with children. If maternal time is not substituted for time of equal quality by other caregivers, children’s development may be penalized. Stress associated with work may also decrease the quality of parenting. This review summarizes causal evidence on the..

Across six Sub-Saharan African countries, grade 4 students of teachers who were hired after a free primary education reform perform worse, on average, on language and math tests—statistically significantly so in language—than students of teachers who were hired before the reform. Teachers who were hired just after the reform also perform worse, on average, on tests of subject content knowledge than those hired before the reform. The results are sensitive to the time frames considered in the analysis, and aggregate results mask substantial variation across countries—gaps are large and sig..

This paper provides a compressive synthesis of the most recent and widely cited literature on the effects of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) adoption at the country, firm, and individual levels. The study surveys and analyzes the available literature on the topics of economic growth and transformation, and highlights the main conclusions drawn by scholars, areas of ongoing debate, and remaining research questions that need to be addressed in future work. The adoption of ICTs has been found to contribute to higher GDP growth in many countries, although the exact mechanism of i..

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. This paper estimates causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling law data across 16 European countries. It analyzes effects on pro-climate beliefs, behaviors, policy preferences, and novel data on voting for green parties—a particularly consequential outcome to combat climate change. Results show a year of education increases pro-climate beliefs, behaviors, most policy ..

Previous studies have explored potential conflicts between ending poverty and limiting global warming, by focusing on the carbon emissions of the world’s poorest. This paper instead focuses on economic growth as the driver of poverty alleviation and estimates the emissions associated with the growth needed to eradicate poverty. With this framing, eradicating poverty requires not only increasing the consumption of poor people, but also the consumption of non-poor people in poor countries. Even in this more pessimistic framing, the global emissions increase associated with eradicating extreme ..

This paper provides novel evidence on the relationship between firm size and effective corporate tax rates, using full-population administrative tax data from 13 countries. In all countries, small firms face lower effective corporate tax rates than mid-sized firms due to reduced statutory tax rates and a higher propensity to register losses. In most countries, effective corporate tax rates fall for the largest firms due to the take-up of tax incentives. As a result, a third of the top 1 percent of firms face effective corporate tax rates below the global minimum tax of 15 percent. The minimum ..

By the time children in low- and middle-income countries start primary school, large socioeconomic disparities are evident in children’s learning and development. Both pre-primary and home environments can play important roles in influencing school readiness and can contribute to disparities in early childhood development, but there is limited evidence on their relative roles in low- and middle-income countries. This paper examines how pre-primary quality, stimulation at home, and early childhood development vary by socioeconomic status for pre-primary students in the Arab Republic of Egypt...

In most disability insurance programs, beneficiaries lose some or all of their benefits if they earn above an earnings threshold. While intended to screen out applicants with high remaining working capacity, earnings limits can also distort the labor supply of beneficiaries. This paper develops a simple framework to evaluate this trade-off. It uses a reduction in the earnings limit in Hungary to examine screening and labor supply responses. The findings show that the policy changed selection into the program modestly, but it reduced labor supply significantly. Viewed through the lens of the mo..

Reducing trade barriers offers tremendous potential for economic growth and productivity gains. However, higher incomes and increased industrial output can negatively impact the environment. This paper studies the impacts of trade liberalization on the emissions of ozone depleting substances regulated under the Montreal Protocol. While freer trade might challenge the gains achieved by the Montreal Protocol by increasing domestic use of ozone depleting substances, environmental provisions in regional trade agreements linked to Montreal Protocol participation might mitigate such negative environ..

Intellectual property rights have become a central emphasis in the negotiation of “deep” preferential trade agreements containing provisions on regulatory environments besides trade policy. These provisions typically require member countries to implement heightened standards on various aspects of intellectual property rights, such as coverage and enforcement, that go beyond the baseline requirements of international intellectual property rights agreements such as the World Tarde Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement. This study implements a &#..

This study provides new evidence on the local labor market impacts of trade, differentiating between the employment, income, migration, and informality channels. It uses a unique dataset matching information on exports and imports from customs with indicators on employment and labor incomes for around 2,000 Mexican municipalities over 2004–14. The analysis uses an instrumental variable approach that combines the initial structure of trade across municipalities with global trends in trade between low- and middle-income countries (excluding Mexico) and the United States by sector. First, the s..

This study offers the first consistent attempt to identify how energy sector decarbonization policies have affected the energy mix over the past four decades across more than 100 developing countries. It applies systematic regression analysis to five energy sector decarbonization outcomes and more than 75 policy instruments aggregated into seven policy packages. Combining instrumental variables with country interactions and country and time fixed effects in regional panels helps address potential endogeneity issues. Only a handful of energy policy packages significantly affect the de..

This paper studies the impact of child labor standards in regional trade agreements on a variety of child labor market outcomes, including employment, education, and household inequality. It develops a stylized general equilibrium model of child labor in an economy open to international trade and considers the impact of regional trade agreements with and without child labor bans. The paper empirically investigates the effects of these clauses in trade agreements in a broad international panel of 101 developing countries, using harmonized survey microdata. Exploiting quasi-experimental methods ..

Climate change and environmental risks are increasingly recognized as a concern for financial authorities, yet empirical evidence of the damage for bank balance sheets is relatively scant. This paper provides preliminary estimates of the aggregate impact of physical risks from climate and environmental-related natural disasters on bank balance sheets across 184 countries over nearly 40 years. Using the local projection method, the analysis finds that severe disaster episodes lead to an increase in the level of systemwide non-performing loans, which is persistent over time. The paper complement..

The severity of COVID-19 disease varies substantially between individuals, with some infections being asymptomatic while others are fatal. Several risk factors have been identified that affect the progression of SARS-CoV-2 to severe COVID-19. They include age, smoking and presence of underlying comorbidities such as respiratory illness, HIV, anemia and obesity. Given that respiratory illness is one such comorbidity and is affected by hand hygiene, it is plausible that improving access to handwashing could lower the risk of severe COVID-19 among a population. In this paper, we estimate the pote..

Understanding the specific factors associated with cholera outbreaks is an integral part of designing better approaches to mitigate their impact. This paper uses georeferenced case data from the cholera epidemic that occurred in Harare, Zimbabwe, from September 2018 to January 2019. The paper applies spatio-temporal modeling to understand how the outbreak unfolded and the factors associated with higher risk of being a reported case. The study highlighted a number of findings. First, using call detail records to estimate weekly population movement throughout the city, the results suggest that h..

Although many countries have established investment promotion agencies over the past two decades, there is little evidence on what characteristics make them effective in attracting foreign direct investment into their home country. To provide new insight into this question, this paper brings together sectoral foreign direct investment data with survey data on investment promotion agency characteristics. Using a structural gravity model framework, it explores the effect of investment promotion agencies’ sectoral targeting on inward foreign direct investment stocks over 2013 to 2018, across a ..

This paper studies the effect of the 2018 drought on household consumption and poverty in Afghanistan, a semi-arid and conflict-affected country. The paper combines geolocated household data with remote-sensing weather data on precipitation, vegetation, and temperature. The findings show that drought-like conditions decreased monthly per capita consumption expenditures and hence increased poverty, with a highly nonlinear relationship between consumption and weather shocks. When forced to cut back, households reduced nonfood consumption to maintain their food consumption; only under severe stre..

This study analyzes how Indonesia’s international trade was affected by its own lockdown policies (domestic) and those of its trading partners (external) in response to COVID-19. The study differentiates between sea freight and air freight, as well as products affected by specific non-tariff measures. Event-study results show that the decline in imports (which were more negatively affected than exports) was mainly attributed to external lockdowns, the impacts of which were more pronounced and persistent for imports entering Indonesia by air (due to restrictions to international travel) and&#..

The paper takes stock of the growing quantitative literature on outcomes for the forcibly displaced in low- and middle-income countries, where 85 percent of refugees and nearly all internally displaced persons live. The main takeaway is that forced dis- placement research has now become a full-fledged sub-field of the migration literature: it addresses the same questions of economic and social integration, returns, and the impact of conditions and policies in the destination country. Yet, the specificity of the sub-field lies in the analysis of migration of a particularly vulnerable population..

This paper studies the effect of regional trade agreements on firms’ exports. Using detailed information on the content of trade agreements and firm-level exports for 31 developing countries between 2000 and 2020, the analysis shows that the depth of trade agreements matters for the export performance of firms. Moving from shallow to deep trade agreements boosts firms’ exports, on average, by 3.6 percent. In line with models of trade with heterogeneous firms, the trade impact of deep trade agreements depends on firm’s characteristics. The impact is stronger for large firms and firms invo..

This paper examines the global drivers of inflation in 55 countries over 1970–2022. The paper estimates a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression model for each country and assess the importance of several global (demand, supply, and oil price) and domestic shocks. It reports three main results. First, global shocks have explained about 26 percent of inflation variation in a typical economy. Oil price shocks accounted for only about 4 percent of inflation variation, but they had a statistically significant impact on inflation in three-quarters of the countries. Second, global shocks have beco..

This paper documents the relationship between legal gender equality and the use of financial services, using individual-level data from 148 developed and developing economies. The analysis, which combines data from the Global Findex and Women, Business and the Law databases, highlights the existence of a significant and positive correlation between gender equality in the law and women’s access to financial products. The results show that greater legal equality alleviates women’s involuntary financial exclusion. The findings also suggest that prevailing adverse social norms can 0ify the ben..