In human capital intensive industries where it is difficult to contract upon the training effort of skilled agents a socially suboptimal level of training may occur. We show how partnership organisations can overcome this problem by tying human and financial capital. Partnerships are opaque so...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-sector of developing and advanced countries.  Regressions of either private-sector employment rates or unemployment rates on two measures of...

We use the rapid expansion of the number of mineral mines in Sub- Saharan Africa to explore changes in local labor markets. Matching over two decades of panel data on industrial mines to survey data for half a million women and exploiting the spatial and temporal variation in the data in a...

We present a theoretical as well as empirical analysis of the impact of employment regulations on permanent and temporary employment. We consider three different forms of such regulations, namely insider protection, fixed term contract regulations, and legislation on temporary work agencies, and...

This paper is a preliminary draft of a chapter for the new Handbook of Labour Economics edited by Orley Ashenfelter and David Card and Published by North Holland.

In the 1980s. India experimented with deregulation in industry and trade. Manufacturing output accelerated but employment declined. The latter has raised doubt regarding desirability of policy reforms.This paper provides an explanation of the employment decline that sheds light on the manner in...

The large-scale reform of the state-owned sector and the development of a private sector in the 1990s changed the nature of employment in urban China. The system of allocated, lifelong jobs (the iron rice bowl) that had previously prevailed under state planning was eroded, permitting more labour...

While use of contract teachers provides a low-cost way to increase teacher numbers, it raises the quality concern that these less trained teachers may be less effective.  We estimate the causal contract-teacher effect on student achievement using school fixed effects and value-added models of...

Using new and unique panel data, we investigate the role of long-term health and childhood malnutrition in schooling outcomes for children in rural India, many of whom lack basic numeracy and literacy skills.  Using data on students' performance on mathematics and Hindi tests, we examine the...

The impact of class size on student achievement remains a thorny question for educational decision makers.  Meta-analyses of empirical studies emphasise the absence of class-size efects but detractors have argued against such pessimistic conclusions because many of the underlying studies have...