To date there has been few systematic and comparative empirical analyses of the nature of economic development in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring the patterns of structural change between 1980 and 2010, focusing on the...

The impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestically owned firms in developing countries has been widely debated in the literature. It has been argued that FDI provides access to advanced technologies and other intangible assets which may spill over to the host country and allow...

The financial crisis led to a deep recession in many industrial countries. While large emerging countries recovered relatively quickly from the financial crisis, their performance deteriorated in the recent years, despite the modest recovery in advanced economies. The higher divergence of...

This paper provides evidence on how executive compensation relates to firm performance in listed firms in China. Using comprehensive financial and accounting data on China's listed firms from 1998 to 2002, augmented by unique data on executive compensation and ownership structure, we find for...

This paper provides new evidence on the wage gap between informal and formal salary workers in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. We use rich datasets that allow us to define informality in a relatively comparable fashion across countries. We compute precise wage differentials by accounting for...

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 estimate the wage penalty associated with working in the South African informal sector. To this end we use a rich data set on non-self employed males that allows one to accurately distinguish workers employed in the informal sector from those employed in the formal sector and link individuals...

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...