We analyze the effects of the unprecedented rise in trade between Germany and "the East" - China and Eastern Europe - in the period 1988-2008 on German local labor markets. Using detailed administrative data, we exploit the cross-regional variation in initial industry structures and use trade...

Trade and migration have become more important in recent years for Austria and Germany. The transition in Central and Eastern Europe has played an important role in this development. The derived labor market consequences are not fully clear so far. This paper presents the results of econometric...

The informal sector plays an important role in the functioning of labor markets in emerging economies. To characterize better this highly heterogeneous sector, we conduct a distributional analysis of the earnings gap between informal and formal employment in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa,...

We show theoretically that when larger firms pay higher wages and are more likely to be caught defaulting on labour taxes, then large high-wage firms will be in the formal sector and small low-wage firms will be in the informal sector. The formal sector wage premium is thus just a firm size wage...

A striking feature of labour supply in South Africa is the phenomenal expansion in the labour force participation of women from 38 percent in 1995 to 46 percent in 2004. Even so, their participation has been persistently lower than that of men whose participation rates were 58 percent and 62...

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...

Re-enrollment in school following a period of dropout is a common feature of the South African school to work transition that has been largely ignored in both the literature on South Africa and the wider literature on sequential schooling choice. In this paper, I quantify the importance of the...

The present study examines the public-private sector wage gap in South Africa using individual cross section data for 2000-7. Results from unconditional quantile regressions and generalised Oaxaca-Blinder type decompositions show that the wage gap is inverted-U shaped across the wage...

In the late 1990s the South African Department of Education implemented two policies that were meant to reduce the large number of over-age learners in the school system: schools were no longer allowed to accept students who were more than two years older than the correct grade-age and students...

As an alternative to traditional academic schooling, vocational schooling in South Africa may serve as a safety valve for students encountering difficulty in the transition from school to work. Yet if ineffective, vocational schooling could also be a sinkhole, offering little chance for success...