Emeryville, CA's Fair Workweek Ordinance (FWO) aimed to reduce service workers' schedule unpredictability by requiring large retail and food service employers to provide advanced notice of schedules and to compensate workers for last-minute schedule changes. From a 1-in-6 sample of Emeryville...

The effect of shift structure on worker performance and productivity is an issue of increasing interest to firms and regulatory bodies. Using approximately 742,000 emergency medical incidents attended by 2,400 paramedics in the state of Mississippi, we evaluate the extent to which paramedics'...

The assignment of workers to tasks is an important feature of the organization of production within firms. We study how task allocation across workers changes in response to productivity shocks. Pairing hourly productivity data from a ready-made garments firm with granular data on exposure to...

Data from 70 large export-oriented garment manufacturers in Bangladesh show that gender wage gaps are similar to those found in higher-income countries. Among production workers, women's wages are 8 percent lower. We show that by combining short administrative panels, survey data from a...

But the disappointments can also be attributed to the preferences because they discouraged additional value-addition in assembly and stimulated the use of expensive fabrics that were unlikely to be produced locally. When the MFA was removed, constrained countries such as China moved strongly...

For two decades, the consensus explanation of the British Industrial Revolution has placed technological change and the supply side at center stage, affording little or no role for demand or overseas trade. Recently, alternative explanations have placed an emphasis on the importance of trade...

This paper analyzes China's experience under U.S. apparel and textile quotas. It makes use of a unique new database that tracks U.S. trading partners' performance under the quota regimes established by the global Multifiber Arrangement (1974 to 1995) and subsequent Agreement on Textiles and...

In this paper I analyze the productivity gains from trade liberalization in the Belgian textile industry. So far, empirical research has established a strong relationship between opening up to trade and productivity, relying almost entirely on deflated sales to proxy for output in the production...