Statistics

This study investigates taxpayer responses to tax compliance interventions undertaken in collaboration with Ethiopia’s revenue authority, focusing on gender differences among business owners. The research targeted a sample of 5,408 business owners, and the interventions—letters highlighting tax obligations and civic responsibilities—were successfully implemented with 3,551 participants. The interventions involved letters emphasizing tax obligations and civic duties and were evaluated through a randomized controlled trial across diverse economic sectors and sub-city locations. Data from quantitative surveys and administrative records provided information about reported tax declarations ..

Weak total factor productivity (TFP) growth has become a central concern in explaining sluggish growth performance, particularly in emerging-market and low-income economies. At the same time, constrained fiscal and investment conditions have increased the importance of using scarce public resources effectively. These conditions make it important to investigate, from a cross-country perspective, what is associated with productivity performance and what shapes productivity losses during adverse shocks. The paper examines this issue along two margins: a structural margin focused on transportation infrastructure, a public-investment-intensive form of capital that may enhance productive efficienc..

This paper examines how federal science and engineering research funding—although intended to advance research—affects degree production and programs offered in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Using data from 1971–2016, the study implements a triple-difference design that exploits variation across colleges, time, and fields of study. The findings show that federal grants generate 27.4 percent of doctorates and 14.7 percent of undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees, as well as 6.3 percent of doctoral programs and 3.7 percent of undergraduate programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics annually across 200 U.S. r..

This study analyzes the impact of the Romania Secondary Education Project, which was designed to improve student retention, graduation rates and pass rates on a national end-of-high-school exam for low-achievement high schools in Romania. The program was implemented in three waves, September 2017, September 2018, and September 2020, with eligible high schools randomly assigned to each. The study exploits this staggered implementation to measure the project’s causal impacts on students. The estimates indicate that the Romania Secondary Education Project had no significant impact on (i) student preferences for attending a program high school, (ii) student retention rates, (iii) high school g..

Assessing the real-world economic value of weather forecasts remains challenging, particularly in the context of high-impact extreme events. Although meteorological skill has improved substantially in recent years—driven by steady advances in physics-based models and impressive breakthroughs in artificial intelligence-based forecasting—operational evaluations still focus primarily on standard skill metrics, with limited consideration of how improvements in meteorological skill translate into economic value. This study proposes a flexible framework to assess the economic value of weather forecasts, with penalty functions that explicitly account for compounding losses as well as declining ..

Viet Nam is committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 15.8% by 2030 and meeting its net-zero emission target by 2050. The industrial sector, including the power sector, is the primary emitter and its active participation is necessary to achieve the targets. This study uses a stated-preference survey Vietnamese firms to understand their preferences in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The study finds that Vietnamese firms prefer to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions through improving energy efficiency, substituting fossil fuels with non-fossil fuels and changing production processes. The ranking of preferences differs across the size, type, ownership and geographical location ..

Psychological constructs related to agency—such as the ability to set goals or feel in control—are increasingly recognized as determinants of economic outcomes and well-being. Yet validated measures are scarce outside Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) contexts. This paper introduces four scales measuring goal-setting capacity, locus of control, generalized livelihoods self-efficacy, and agricultural self-efficacy, tested through representative and specialized surveys in Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. All the scales demonstrate strong psychometric properties, although locus of control shows weaker internal reliability. Five-point Like..

This paper shows that infrastructure investments enhance local tax outcomes. The analysis draws on a novel dataset combining information on the location and timing of all road upgrades in Rwanda with 12 years of administrative tax and census records, it estimates large and significant increases in tax revenues in municipalities near upgraded roads. These effects are driven by firm entry as well as land value appreciation, captured through taxes on rental income at the local level. Finally, the paper shows that although the additional revenues do not fully recover the central government’s initial investment, local municipalities’ revenues more than double within five years following the u..

Letters of credit are a key trade finance instrument that covers more than 10 percent of global trade, with a notably larger role in low- and middle-income economies. Studying detailed trade data from Viet Nam, this paper documents how the use of letters of credit varies with firm characteristics. The paper shows that the probability of using a letter of credit is systematically lower for younger, smaller, and foreign-owned trading firms. Importers that are less diversified or have less trading experience are more likely to use letters of credit. Firm characteristics have the strongest effects in markets where information is scarce and enforcement is weak. These patterns are consistent with ..

This paper examines how armed conflict affects the global allocation of foreign direct investment using monthly conflict fatality data matched with project-level greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) and cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) from 2010–2023. The presence of an armed conflict is associated with a decline in the number of greenfield projects (16.5%), FDI associated jobs (15.6%), the number of origin countries (12.4%), and the number of sectors (15.6%). The sensitivity of FDI to conflicts has intensified during 2020–2023, especially so for one-sided violence against civilians. Conflict fatalities that are geographically dispersed within a country are more strongl..

Do politicians pursue reforms when they know that status-quo policies are inefficient? Prior literature has answered this question as dependent upon reelection incentives to pander to uninformed voters. This paper shows that reform failure can arise from political selection, or the intrinsic characteristics of those who pursue leadership positions and careers in politics, even when voters would like governments to pursue efficient policies. First, the paper shows how incrementally changing the environment in pandering models can yield political selection of “status-quo” types rather than “reformers” as the driving force behind reform failures. In stark contrast to prevailing explanat..

This publication provides an overview about the prevalence of gender-based violence focusing on childhood and adulthood experiences. The report provides a short methodological overview of the data...

This paper evaluates a socio-emotional skills training programme for 4,728 urban Tanzanian youth who were not in full-time employment, education, or training. A randomized design compared awareness (for example, self-awareness, empathy, and active listening), management (for example, self-control, personal initiative, and negotiation), and combined curricula. Socio-emotional skills were measured using self-reported and behavioral indicators. Training increased self-reported socio-emotional skills in the short run across both domains, but had limited effects on behavioral measures, and all socio-emotional skills gains faded after one year. Modest but sustained employment gains were observed a..

Natural hazards can profoundly disrupt economies, yet their impact on employment remains underexplored. This study quantifies job losses due to floods, earthquakes, wind, storm surges, tsunamis, and heat across 132 countries, using a full-time job equivalent loss estimation approach. The results show that fast-onset natural shocks cause 9.4 million job equivalent losses annually on average, predominantly due to earthquakes and floods, with burdens concentrated in East Asia and the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, extreme heat was associated with 79.7 million job equivalent losses annually across 114 countries between 2015 and 2024, with the burdens concentrated in South Asia and..

Does cybersecurity preparedness matter for growth, and if so, where? This paper provides evidence that cybersecurity preparedness amplifies growth in digitally exposed sectors, highlighting its role as a key institutional complement to digitalization. The analysis uses an interaction design across countries and sectors on a panel of 178 countries, five sectors, and two growth intervals, exploiting differences across sectors within the same country period and over time. The estimates imply that a one standard deviation increase in cybersecurity preparedness is associated with about 1 to 2 percentage points higher annualized value added growth in sectors that are more vulnerable to cyber risk ..

This paper uses five rounds of Mexican and Brazilian census extracts to evaluate the accuracy of different model specifications and estimation methods that use survey and census data to generate small area estimates of poverty. Models that utilize more granular data for prediction (household- and/or village-level predictors) tend to pro-duce more accurate estimates of poverty than models estimated only using area-level predictors. Differences in accuracy across models and methods that utilize household or village level predictors are minor. Models that omit household-level predictors tend to be more robust than unit-level models to the use of old census data and classical measurement error i..

This study estimates the child penalty in Türkiye, defined as the negative impact of having a child on mothers' labor market outcomes. Utilizing the Survey of Income and Living Conditions data from 2006 to 2023, the analysis reveals a significant child penalty, which varies across regions within the country. Panel-based estimates show that women’s labor force participation drops by 44 percent in the year following child’s birth, while their employment rates decline by 40% percent. Additionally, for mothers who remained employed, their working hours decrease by approximately 7%, while the likelihood of informal employment increases by 69% three years after childbirth. The results highlig..