Weekly links July 19: Links and data from impact evaluations

• The Center for Financial Inclusion blog discusses new global data on corruption - Sierra Leone recorded the highest rate with 81 percent of polled individuals reporting that they had paid a bribe during the past year, followed by Liberia, Yemen, and Kenya, with 75, 74, and 70 percent, respectively.
• The Wall Street Journal India covers work by Michael Greenstone and co-authors on third-party auditing of Indian factories for pollution. Overall, auditors in the experimental group were 80% less likely to report falsely that a plant was in compliance with air- and water-pollution rules than auditors in the business-as-usual group. As an example of how even evidence that confirms existing beliefs can be useful the story has “We were not very surprised," says pollution-board administrator Hardik Shah, "but we didn't have anything concrete to tell auditors and firms: You can do better."
• From the World Bank Trade post blog - The impact of Israeli check-points on employment in the West Bank - placing just one check-point a minute away from a town reduced by half of a percentage point the probability of the town’s residents being employed. It reduced the residents’ hourly wage by 5.2 percent. We estimate that the presence of check-points caused approximately 6,900 more unemployed workers in 2007 in the West Bank

More data from impact evaluations
The World Bank’s Central Microdata catalog now has 1258 surveys or groups of surveys listed, including data from 43 impact evaluations. I’ve been slowly getting some of my datasets from studies I have worked on into this library (and thank Antonina Redko of the data group for her help in getting these added). Among the data I’ve put up include:
 

• A cross-sectional survey of Bolivian firms used to evaluate the impact of being formal – an example of using instrumental variables for evaluation.
• Baseline and Follow-up data from informal firms in Brazil, used for my recent working paper on experiments to formalize firms – an example of RCT data.
• Municipal data on registration and taxes for Minas Gerais, used in a recent evaluation of the impact of a program to make it easier for firms to register – an example of using matching and difference-in-differences.
• Baseline and two rounds of follow-up data on young women in Jordan, used in an experiment on getting young women into jobs.
• Baseline and three rounds of follow-up data from informal firms in Sri Lanka, used for an experiment on formalizing firms.
• Five rounds of data on female microenterprise owners in Sri Lanka, used for business training experiments.
• 13 rounds of microenterprise data from Sri Lanka from the first experiment I ever ran, giving one-time grants to small firms.

My webpage also contains links to these as well as to several other replication datasets for several other of my studies.