03. Journals

3,111 items available

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https://hdl.handle.net/10986/2210

These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 46

Gender Differences in Informal Labor-Market Resilience
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-12-26) Hardy, Morgan; Litzow, Erin; McCasland, Jamie; Kagy, Gisella
This paper reports on the universe of garment-making-firm owners in a Ghanaian district capital during the COVID-19 crisis. By July 2020, 80 percent of both male- and female-owned firms were operational. However, pre-pandemic data show that selection into persistent closure differs by gender. Consistent with a cleansing effect of recessions and highlighting the presence of marginal female entrepreneurs, female-owned firms that remain closed past the spring lockdown are negatively selected on pre-pandemic sales. The pre-pandemic sales distributions of female survivors and non-survivors are significantly different from each other. Female owners of non-operational firms exit to non-employment and experience large decreases in overall earnings. In contrast, persistently closed male-owned firms are not selected on pre-pandemic firm characteristics. Instead, male non survivors are 36 percentage points more likely than male survivors to have another income-generating activity prior to the crisis. Male owners of persistently closed firms fully compensate for revenue losses in their core businesses with earnings from these alternative income-generating activities. Taken together, the evidence is most consistent with differential underlying occupational choice fundamentals for self-employed men and women in this context.
Method Matters: Underreporting of Intimate Partner Violence in Nigeria and Rwanda
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-12-08) Cullen, Claire
This paper analyzes the magnitude and predictors of misreporting on intimate partner violence. Women in Nigeria were randomly assigned to answer questions using either an indirect method (list experiment) that gives respondents anonymity, or the standard, direct face-to-face method. Intimate partner violence rates were up to 35 percent greater when measured using the list method than the direct method. Misreporting was associated with indicators often targeted in empowerment and development programs, such as education and vulnerability. These results suggest that standard survey methods may generate significant underestimates of the prevalence of intimate partner violence, and biased correlations and treatment effect estimates.
Refugees and Housing: Evidence from the Mortgage Market
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-12-06) Akgündüz, Yusuf Emre; Hacıhasanoglu, Yavuz Selim; Yilmaz, Fatih
This paper investigates the impact of large-scale Syrian refugee inflows on the Turkish housing market. Employing a micro-level data set of the population of mortgaged houses in Türkiye between 2010 and 2017, it identifies the dynamic effects using a difference-in-differences approach. As the regional distribution of Syrian refugees is presumably not exogenous, it is instrumented in the estimations. The instrument is constructed using the distance from Turkish provinces to each Syrian region, while weighting each Syrian region by their population and distance to Türkiye compared to other destination countries. The results show that house prices increased in response to the arrival of Syrian refugees. The effects are mostly driven by low-priced housing and faded after 2014. The results further show that construction permits and sales increased, while the average age of purchased houses declined, indicating an increase in supply that may explain the fading-out effect over time. Finally, the findings provide suggestive evidence that houses that are sold after the arrival of refugees decline in size, which further points to a squeeze in the housing market for natives.
Syrian Refugee Inflows, Health-Care Access, and Childhood Vaccination in Turkey
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-11-14) Erten, Bilge; Keskin, Pinar; Omurtak, Miray; Ozen, Ilhan Can
This study explores the impact of the arrival of Syrian refugees in Turkey on access to health-care resources and subsequent changes in infectious disease rates among native children. Employing a distance-based instrument, it finds that native children living in regions that received large inflows of Syrian refugees experienced an increase in their risk of catching an infectious disease compared to children in less affected regions. In contrast, there is no evidence of significant changes in the incidences of noninfectious diseases such as diabetes, cancer, or anemia. The findings also reveal that the number of health-care professionals and hospital beds per capita declined in provinces that received large refugee inflows. This study also documents a decrease in native children’s probability of being fully vaccinated in provinces that received large refugee inflows. Although contact with potentially infected refugees may increase disease spread among natives, the migration-induced supply constraints in health-care access may also worsen health outcomes in host countries.
Legal Bans, Female Genital Cutting, and Education: Evidence from Senegal
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-10-17) García-Hombrados, Jorge; Salgado, Edgar
A law that banned the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) in Senegal in 1999 reduced its prevalence and increased educational investments in girls. These results are not driven by mechanisms like health, broader changes in empowerment, or child marriage. Suggestive evidence indicates that results could be driven by some parents of future brides reacting to the increase in the cost of FGC caused by the law by abandoning this practice and investing in their daughter’s education to compensate for smaller bride prices among uncut women.
The Timing of Elections and Neonatal Mortality: Evidence from India
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-10-08) Bhattacharjee, Shampa
This paper uncovers evidence of political cycles in developmental outcomes in the Indian context. Comparing children born to the same mother, it shows that children born 0-11 months before scheduled state legislative assembly elections have a significantly lower risk of neonatal mortality. The effect of being born just before elections is higher in politically more competitive regions. The paper provides some evidence of the channels behind this result. The usage of prenatal care increases before elections and mothers of children born before elections are more likely to have antenatal checkups and tetanus injections during pregnancy. Components of antenatal checkups, like the probability of having a blood test or an abdominal examination during pregnancy, also increase before elections. The improvement in child health outcomes before elections seems to be driven by a transfer of resources from non-election to election years rather than an overall improvement in child health outcomes.
Nowcasting Global Poverty
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-10-06) Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Aguilar, R. Andrés Castañeda; Newhouse, David
This paper evaluates different methods for nowcasting country-level poverty rates, including methods that apply statistical learning to large-scale country-level data obtained from the World Development Indicators and Google Earth Engine. The methods are evaluated by withholding measured poverty rates and determining how accurately the methods predict the held-out data. A simple approach that scales the last observed welfare distribution by a fraction of real GDP per capita growth performs nearly as well as models using statistical learning on 1,000 plus variables. This GDP-based approach outperforms all models that predict poverty rates directly, even when the last survey is up to five years old. The results indicate that in this context, the additional complexity introduced by applying statistical learning techniques to a large set of variables yields only marginal improvements in accuracy.
Roads and Jobs in Ethiopia
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-09-22) Fiorini, Matteo; Sanfilippo, Marco
Does improving roads affect jobs and structural transformation A novel geocoded data set covering the universe of Ethiopian roads matched with individual data allows the relationship between improvements in road infrastructure and labor-market outcomes over the 1994–2013 period to be identified. At the district level, greater market access due to better roads correlates with the process of structural transformation in Ethiopia. Improvements in market access are related to reductions in the share of agricultural workers and increases in that of workers in the services sector, but not in manufacturing. Heterogeneity in this relationship exists across industries, gender, education level, and age cohorts. Patterns of internal migration and changes in economic opportunities can help rationalize these findings.
Keep It Simple: A Field Experiment on Information Sharing among Strangers
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-09-22) Batista, Cátia; Fafchamps, Marcel; Vicente, Pedro C
SMS information campaigns are increasingly used for policy. A field experiment is conducted to study information sharing through mobile phone messages. Subjects are rural households in Mozambique who have access to mobile money. In the baseline intervention, subjects receive an SMS containing simple instructions on how to redeem a voucher for mobile money. They can share this non-rival information with other exogenously assigned subjects unknown to them. Few participants redeem the voucher. They nonetheless share it with others and many share information about the voucher they do not use themselves. The voucher is shared more when no information is provided on the receiver. When partial information is provided, no evidence is found of more sharing with subjects who have similar characteristics. Treatments are introduced to increase the cost of sending a message, shame those who do not send the voucher to others or allow subjects to appropriate the value of the voucher. All these treatments decrease information sharing. To encourage information diffusion among strangers, the best is to keep it simple.
The Lasting Labor-Market Effects of Cash Transfers: Evidence from South Africa’s Child Support Grant
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-09-16) Tondini, Alessandro
Can unconditional cash transfers have long-term benefits for women’s employment in developing countries This study exploits discontinuous exposure to the South African Child Support Grant for mothers whose children were born one year apart to identify the short- and long-term effects of a positive income shock of roughly $400 ($650 PPP in 2010). In the short term, there is a considerable increase in the probability of being active and looking for a job. Five years after receiving the transfer, mothers who benefited for one year are as likely to be employed as those who never received it; the type of occupation is also similar, other than a small decrease in work in the agricultural sector. Overall, the grant appears to facilitate job search for single mothers in the presence of high search costs, but does not significantly change job prospects.