What happens when a previously uncovered labor market is regulated? We exploit the introduction of a minimum wage in South Africa and variation in the intensity of this law to identify increases in wages for domestic workers and no statistically significant effects on employment on the intensive...

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo offer a coherent vision for an economics of poverty and antipoverty policy. Their economics is grounded in an effort to understand the economic and psychological complexities in the lives of poor people, informed by social experiments and field observations....

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

Causal evidence on microcredit impacts informs theory, practice, and debates about its effectiveness as a development tool. The six randomized evaluations in this volume use a variety of sampling, data collection, experimental design, and econometric strategies to identify causal effects of...

The purpose of guest or temporary foreign worker programs (TFWPs) is to add workers to the labor force but not permanent residents to the population, meaning that TFWPs are based on the principle of rotating foreign workers in and out of the country. A third of the roughly 115 million...

Unemployment rates have been persistently high, particularly for young labour market entrants. Rising access to education has increased the supply of high-skilled labour, but the private sector has mainly created jobs in low-skill intensive and low-productivity activities, leading to high...

In the U.S., occupational licensing is more prevalent in the public sector than in the private sector, but the influence of occupational regulation for public sector workers has not been analyzed in detail. Our study initially examines the probability of a licensed worker selecting into the...

Programs to encourage labor market activity among youth, including public employment programs and wage subsidies like the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, can be supported by three broad rationales. They may: (1) provide contemporaneous income support to participants; (2) encourage work experience...

This paper estimates the impact of several institutions and policies on youth and total unemployment rates for a large set of developed countries during the last three decades. The estimation technique used is a fixed effect panel analysis. Our empirical analysis shows that, in addition to...