Australia is experiencing its largest mining boom for more than a century and a half. This paper explores, from a national perspective, important economic differences that arise when a mining boom, such as the current one, is generated by export price increases (trading gains) rather than export...

This paper augments the existing literature on trade and child labor by exploring the effects of terms of trade changes in the context of a three good general equilibrium model, where one of the goods is a non-traded good. We find that under quasi-linear preferences the effect of the terms of...

Trade liberalization is often met with sharp opposition. Recent examples include the so-called "Bolkestein" directive, which allows service providers from a given EU member to temporarily work in another member country. One way to view such a reform is that it simply widens the range of goods...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

In August 2010 the Costa Rican government implemented a comprehensive program to increase compliance with legal minimum wages, the Campaign for Minimum Wages. To evaluate the impact of the Campaign, we use a regression discontinuity approach, which compares what happened to workers who before...

Using a common methodology, the effects of unions on wage levels and wage dispersion are estimated for two neighboring countries, Bolivia and Chile, and for the U.S. The analysis shows that unions have broadly similar effects on the wage distribution within these three economies. The findings...

We analyze differences by gender in the time dedicated to total work (paid and unpaid) by families in Latin America, with particular attention to the effect of social norms. To this end, we use survey data on time use in Mexico (2009), Peru (2010), Ecuador (2012) and Colombia (2012), to estimate...

This paper analyzes, using country-level panel data from transition economies and Latin America, the impact of labor market institutions on informal economic activity. The measure of informal economic activity is taken from Schneider et al. (2010), the most comprehensive study to date. The data...

The international business cycle is very important for Latin America’s economic performance as the recent global crisis vividly illustrated. This paper investigates how changes in trade linkages between China, Latin America, and the rest of the world have altered the transmission mechanism of...

It has been argued that a factor behind the decline in income inequality in Latin America in the 2000s was the educational upgrading of its labor force. Between 1990 and 2010, the proportion of the labor force in the region with at least secondary education increased from 40 to 60 percent....