The paper describes and evaluates unemployment insurance savings accounts (UISAs) - a relatively new and not well-known way of providing unemployment benefits. The UISAs reduce work disincentives by allowing recipients to keep their own unused unemployment contributions, and offer the...

This paper uses micro data from the ILO-STWT surveys to provide novel evidence on the duration, end point and determinants of the transition from school to work in a sample of 23 low and middle-income countries around the world. The negative effects of low levels of human capital and high levels...

This paper examines the determinants of labor market transitions into and out of self-employment (own-account work and employer), using panel data from 12 developing countries in multiple regions. Despite cross-country heterogeneity, a few consistent patterns emerge. Entering the labor market...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality and unemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to the same externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal and informal firms have monopoly...

This paper proposes an overlapping generations multi‐sector model of the labor market for developing countries with three heterogeneities – heterogeneity within self‐employment, heterogeneity in ability, and heterogeneity in age. We revisit an iconic paradox in a class of multi‐sector...

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) argues for relaxing the standard definition of unemployment in developing countries by eliminating the requirement that a person be actively searching for a job. We examine whether such an extension of the standard definition is appropriate in the case...

This paper investigates the impacts of the economic shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on the employment of different types of workers in developing countries. Employment outcomes are taken from a set of high-frequency phone surveys conducted by the World Bank and National Statistics Offices...

This paper analyses the difference in short-term employment recovery between young men and women in India, Peru and Vietnam following the national lockdowns imposed in all three countries during 2020. We employ a mediation model to establish whether - and to what extent - commonly suggested...

This paper proposes an equilibrium matching model for developing countries' labor markets where the interaction between public, formal private and informal private sectors are taken into account. Theoretical analysis shows that gains from reforms aiming at liberalizing formal labor markets can...

Governments around the developing world face pressure to intervene actively to help jobseekers find employment. Two of the most common policies used are job training, based on the idea that many of those seeking jobs lack the skills employers want, and job search assistance, based on the...