Using German data from the Institute for Employment Research Establishment Panel, this paper constructs two main measures of outsourcing and examines their determinants and consequences for employment. There are some commonalities in the correlates of the two measures of outsourcing, as well as...

'League table' information on school effectiveness in England generally relies on either a comparison of the average outcomes of pupils by school, e.g. mean exam scores, or on estimates of the average value added by each school. These approaches assume that the information parents and...

The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

This paper adopts the technique of DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) to decompose differences in the distribution of PISA test scores in Canada, and assesses the relative contribution of differences in the distribution of “class size” and time-in-term, other school factors and student...

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...

This paper examines the reasons behind the low rates of participation in old age pension programs in developing countries. Using a large set of harmonized household surveys from Latin America we assess how much of the low participation can be explained by involuntary rationing out of jobs with...

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,...

This paper conducts a cohort analysis of labor participation in urban Mexico in recent decades. The rates analyzed are the labor force participation, the unemployment rate, and the employment shares of the formal and informal salaried sectors, as well as of self-employment. These rates are...

In this paper I present a methodology that uses matching comparisons to explain gender differences in wages. The approach emphasizes gender differences in the supports of the distributions of observable characteristics and provides useful insights about the distribution of the unexplained gender...