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Supplemental Material for Segregation and “Out-of-Placeness”: The Direct Effect of Neighborhood Racial Composition on Police Stops by Laura Schenker, David Sylvan, Jean-Louis Arcand, and Ravi Bhavnani in Political Research Quarterly

Additional file 1: Details concerning the dataset, the mathematical framework, the estimation methods and the full set of results and robustness checks.

Cet article présente une méthode originale d’évaluation de l’impact des projets d’aide au développement dans les zones fragiles et difficiles d’accès, sur la base d’un exemple appliqué aux pays du G5 Sahel. Sur la base de données géolocalisées et en utilisant des informations détaillées sur les projets de la Banque mondiale fournies par AIDDATA, des enquêtes périodiques (DHS, EPA) et des données sur la luminosité nocturne, cet article montre qu’il est possible de mener des évaluations d’impact à coût limité et en respectant les contraintes méthodologiques de ce type d’évaluations, notamment : (i) le problème lié à la définition d’un contrefactuel. Il est possible de localiser les individus par rapport à l’emplacement du projet, et la définition d’un rayon d’action permet d’identifier deux groupes (un groupe traité et un groupe de référence).

Forthcoming

A recent policy brief from the Peterson Institute suggests that the "Too Much Finance" result may be an artifact of spurious attribution of causality. While more works needs do be done to understand the links between finance and growth and explore the drivers of possible non-monotonicities, this note shows that the too much finance result is robust.

The part that language might play in economic development has long intrigued scholars from various disciplines. However, no clear story has emerged from the investigations published to date, and the empirical evidence remains inconclusive (Nettle, 2000). The issues at hand are exceedingly broad, and the nature of the links that one wishes to identify, and then measure, is difficult to pinpoint precisely: what do we mean exactly by “development”? And since ‘language' pervades just about every facet of individual and social life, including economic processes, what manifestations of language should we assume to play a specific role in determining development related outcomes? The very existence of such a link is not self-evident, and most economic analyses, including those in the field known as development economics, tend to assume language away on the grounds that the economic processes at hand, being universal, transcend linguistic variables. It is only in recent years that ‘culture', which, as an explanatory variable, had largely been relegated to the fringes of development economics as merely contextual, has been allowed to drift back near the centre of the field. Typical recent examples include work by Nobel laureate George Akerlof (Akerlof and Kranton, 2000) on the relationship between economics and identity, or the study of the role played by religiosity in economic development (Barro and McCleary, 2003).

Une question récurrente qui déroute plusieurs chercheurs et certains responsables politiques est celle de savoir pourquoi les évaluations d'impact, qui sont devenues monnaie courante dans le domaine du développement, ont si peu d'impact sur la prise de décision à proprement parler. Dans cet article, j'étudie l'impact des évaluations d'impact. Je fais appel à un cadre bayésien simple emboîté dans un modèle standard reposant sur une fonction de « contest success ». Avec ce modèle de concurrence entre des décideurs anti-évaluation, des décideurs bayésiens et des évaluateurs fréquentistes, je montre que la probabilité d'annulation d'un programme est une fonction décroissante de l'impact estimé par l'évaluation et de la croyance a priori sur la base de laquelle le programme a été initialement approuvé. En outre, la probabilité d'annulation est une fonction décroissante de l'efficacité de l'influence exercée par les évaluateurs fréquentistes. Dans la mesure où il est fort probable que cette efficacité en termes de lobbying des évaluateurs fréquentistes soit proche de zéro dans la vraie vie, la probabilité d'annulation d'un programme qui avait été approuvé au départ, bien qu'il soit entaché d'une évaluation très négative, est extrêmement faible. Le modèle fournit ainsi une explication possible de la raison pour laquelle les évaluations d'impact ont si peu d'impact sur la prise de décision, et pourquoi elles ont si peu contribué à la prise de décision fondée sur les faits.

This paper develops a simple model with credit rationing and endogenous default risk in which the expectation of a bailout may lead to a financial sector which is too large with respect to the the social optimum. The paper concludes with a short discussion of how this model could be used as a building block for models aimed at endogenizing the probability of a bailout, and discussing the relationship between the size of the finanancial sector and economic growth in the presence of default risk.

This paper aims to provide the first evidence concerning the relationship between time and risk preferences and illegal migration in an African context. Based upon our theoretical model and using a unique data set on potential migrants collected in urban Senegal, we evaluate a measure of time and risk preferences through the individual's intertemporal discount rate and coefficient of absolute risk aversion. Remarkably, our results show that these individual preferences matter in the willingness to migrate illegally and to pay a smuggler.

The recent theoretical literature on the determinants of trade agreements has stressed the importance of political gains, such as credibility, as a rationale for trade agreements. The empirical literature, however, has lagged behind in the estimation of the economic gains or losses associated with these politically motivated trade agreements. This paper fills that gap by providing estimates of the economic impact of politically and economically motivated trade agreements. We find that credibility gains play a role in increasing the probability of two countries signing an agreement. Moreover, agreements with a stronger political motivation are more trade creating than agreements that are signed for pure market access / economic reasons, and the value for the government of solving its time inconsistency problems through trade agreements is estimated at an average of 1.8% of GDP, which compares quite well with the traditional estimates of the economic gains from trade.

Illegal immigration from the developing world to rich countries is one of the most controversial topics today. Using a unique data set on potential illegal migrants collected in Dakar, Senegal, we characterize the preferences and characteristics of illegal migrants, and the manner in which these factors interact so as to yield observed behavior. On the basis of our theoretical model, we evaluate a measure of the time and risk preferences through the individual discount rates and the individual coefficients of absolute risk aversion. Then, we test empirically our theoretical propositions and we show that these variables play a role, in the illegal migration decision, in the willingness to pay a smuggler and in the choice of the method of migration, at least as important as "classical" migration determinants such as the expected wage in the host country.

In their celebrated contribution on credit rationing, Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) showed that the expected return to the borrower on a loan is increasing in the risk of the project it funds. In this paper, I show that their results do not necessarily carry over to the case where the agents' preferences can be described by rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU). In particular, a pessimistic probability distortion function for borrowers can yield sufficient concavity in returns for the latter to be decreasing in risk, thus eliminating adverse selection. Whether credit rationing can obtain or not is then shown to depend upon the interaction between borrower pessimism and lender optimism.

When market structure is complete, factor demands by households will be independent of their characteristics, and households will take their production decisions as if they were profit-maximizing firms. This observation constitutes the basis for one of the most popular empirical tests for complete markets, commonly known as the “separation” hypothesis. In this article, we show that most existing tests for separation using panel data are potentially biased towards rejecting the null-hypothesis of complete markets, because of the failure to adequately control for unobservable household-specific effects. Since the variables on which the test for separation is based cannot be identifed in most panel datasets following the usual covariance transformations, and are likely to be correlated with the household-specific effect, neither the within nor the variance-components procedures are able to solve the problem. We show that the Hausman-Taylor 1981 estimator, in which the impact of covariates that are invariant along one dimension of a panel can be identifed through the use of covariance transformations of other included variables that are orthogonal to the household-specific effects as instruments, provides a simple solution. Our approach is applied to a rich Tunisian dataset in which separation –and thus the null of complete markets– is strongly rejected using the standard approach, but is not rejected once correlated unobservable household-specific effects are controlled for using the Hausman-Taylor instrument set.

In this paper, we present a rent-seeking model of conflict, which highlights the role of ideology in determining whether the government or the rebels take the initiative. We use the model to interpret the impact of a large-scale Community-Driven Development project on civil conflict in the Philippines. The country is characterized by the presence of two rebel groups, the New People's Army (NPA) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), with two distinct ideologies. We use a unique geo-referenced panel dataset on the occurrence of conflicts in 2003 and 2006 gathered from local newspapers that we match with nationally representative household survey and budget data on all municipalities in the country. Consistent with our model's predictions, using a variety of estimation strategies, we find robust evidence that the project leads to a decline in MILF-related events and to an increase in NPA-related events.

We examine cross-sectional empirical evidence on the determinants of economic growth in light of an instrumental variables estimator, based on sample moments of order higher than two, which does not require extraneous instruments and which remains consistent, under quite reasonable assumptions, when measurement errors affect the explanatory variables. We focus on several in‡fluential papers — Barro (1991), Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992), Sachs and Warner (1997a), Easterly and Levine (1997), Levine and Zervos (1998)— and find that many of their results are “fragile”. We argue that the application of our estimator to cross-sectional empirical studies of the determinants of growth yields important insights which may qualify previous findings in the literature, especially given the errors in variables problems which are known to plague commonly used cross-sectional datasets.

Using unique village census data collected in 2003 and 2008 in Senegal, we assess the impact of a major World Bank-funded Community Driven Development (CDD) program on membership and assortative matching in community-based organizations (CBOs). We implement both standard discrete choice and dyadic regression techniques. We find that channeling development aid through CBOs makes these organizations more inclusive in the sense that a number of tradition-bound assortative matching patterns are partly broken. Ceteris paribus, this leads to more heterogeneous CBOs. On the other hand, the likelihood of CBO membership is reduced in treated villages, with significant differences between men and women. Our results suggest that grassroots level development projects which target CBOs must be carefully designed and executed if they are not to result, paradoxically, in a greater degree of social exclusion, with differentiation by gender playing a crucial role.

This paper considers whether it is differences in technical efficiency or differences in factor endowments that explain productivity differentials in Moldovan agriculture. We compute non-parametric measures of technical efficiency for a sample of Moldovan small-holders using the four-step Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach suggested by Fried, Schmidt and Yaisawang (1999). We also consider a model of class structure inspired by the work of Eswaran and Kotwal (1986), and estimate a bivariate probit model that explains a household's labor market participation decisions (and hence class membership) in terms of its factor endowments. These constructs are then used in an effort to understand the determinants of output per hectare in Moldovan agriculture. We find that differences in technical efficiency explain very little of the great heterogeneity in productivity observed in our sample, while class membership is slightly more successful. Our empirical model of class structure suggests that self sufficient households will disappear and be replaced by a class of small capitalist farmers as land and credit markets develop.