East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family...

In this paper we analyse the labor market and its relationship with globalization in two groups of countries similar in their GDP per capita levels at the beginning of the 1980s but otherwise significantly different in their economic and social structures. On the one hand we look at Argentina,...

The financial and economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 has taken its toll on the South African economy. The economy contracted for the first time since 1998, and entered recession during the fourth quarter of 2008. The GDP contraction was soon transmitted to the labor market. Between the second...

This paper examines how different types of workers in 17 middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Impacts on different types of workers varied by country and were only weakly related to the severity of the shock. Among active workers, youth...

This paper examines the consequences of rapid disinflation for downward wage rigidities in two emerging countries, Brazil and Uruguay, relying on high quality matched employer-employee administrative data. Downward nominal wage rigidities are more important in Uruguay, while wage indexation is...

The aim of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence on the impact of international financial integration on the long-run Real Exchange Rate (RER) in 39 developing countries belonging to three different geographical regions (Latin America, Asia and MENA). It covers the period 1979-2004,...

China's phenomenal growth is accompanied by both relatively low level of standards of living and high inequality. It is widely believe that investing in education could be an effective strategy to promote higher standards of living as well as to reduce inequality. However, little is known about...

The EU experience with youth unemployment has changed over recent years with the launch and re-launch of the Lisbon Strategy and the Bologna process. A dramatic shift has taken place from the 1990s emphasis on labour market flexibility as a tool to abate youth long term unemployment to the more...

The gradualist approach to economic transition in Belarus would contribute to form the a priori expectation that the rate of return to education is low and the earnings profile by work experience flat, like they supposedly were under central-planning. However, the first available estimates of...

Unlike in many other transition countries, where the gender pay gap has remained stable while female employment rates have reduced, in the case of Belarus women’ activity rate has been practically unchanged despite an increase in the gender pay gap. This paper investigates why this is the case...