Over half of all workers in the developing world are self-employed. Although some self-employment is chosen by entrepreneurs with well-defined projects and ambitions, roughly two thirds results from individuals having no better alternatives. The importance of self-employment in the overall...

This paper considers the role mergers and acquisitions have on employment. First, it considers the importance of different aspects of compensation policy and human resource management practices for distinguishing acquired and acquiring firms. Second, it examines which individuals from which...

We use longitudinal individual wage and employment data in France and the United States to investigate the effect of changes in the real minimum wage rate on an individual's employment status. We focus on workers employed at wages close enough to the minimum in a reference year as to be illegal...

We use matched firm-worker panel data from France and Norway to consider observationally equivalent alternatives to the hypothesis that firms share product market rents with their workers in the form of higher wages. After documenting the main stylized facts, we find that neither the main...

In this paper, we estimate the difference in long-run after-tax and transfer income from employment and from non-employment available in January 1998 to families in France that received the Guaranteed Minimum Income (RMI) in December 1996. Based on estimated wages we compute potential increases...

Most welfare programs generate high marginal tax rates on labor income. This paper uses a representative sample of individuals on France's main welfare program (the Revenu Minimum d'Insertion, or RMI) to estimate monetary gains to employment for welfare recipients. This is based on the...

This article analyses the distributional impact of remittances across two regions of Algerian emigration (Nedroma and Idjeur) using an original survey we conducted of 1,200 households in 2011. Remittances and especially the role played by foreign pensions decrease the Gini index by nearly 4 %...

This paper studies why PhDs in France take longer to find stable jobs than engineers. Using data from CEREQ's "Génération 2004" survey, we show that job finding rates of PhDs are lower than those of engineers and document the differences in their observable characteristics and fields of study....

Frictional labor markets impose a fundamental trade-off: individuals may work on their own at any time, but can only take a potentially better-paid wage job after spending some time looking for it, suggesting that intertemporal considerations affect how people choose their occupation. We...