Women's labor force participation has rapidly increased in most countries, but mothers still struggle to achieve a satisfactory work-life balance. Childcare allows the primary caregiver, usually the mother, to take time away from childrearing for employment. Family policies that subsidize...

This paper explores the short-term employment effect of deregulating job protection forregular workers and how it varies with prevailing business cycle conditions. We apply a localprojection method to a newly constructed 'narrative' dataset of major regular job protectionreforms covering 26...

Imagine a government confronted with a controversial policy question, like whether it should cut the level of unemployment benefits. Will social welfare rise as a result? Will some groups be winners and other groups be losers? Will the welfare gap between the employed and unemployed increase?...

We estimate the elasticity of private-sector employment to non-oil GDP in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for GCC nationals and expatriates using a Seemingly Unrelated Error Correction (SUREC) model. Our results indicate that the employment response is lower for nationals, who have an...

We take advantage of a natural experiment in the minimum wage setting in Russia to study the employment consequences of large hikes in the minimum wage. In September 2007, the Russian government raised the federal minimum wage from 1100 to 2300 Rubles and simultaneously gave the regions the...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-section of developing and advanced countries, and discuss the implications for countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus and Central Asia....

The introduction of unemployment insurance savings accounts (UISA) in Chile in October 2002 introduced more comprehensive unemployment protection while decreasing the opportunity costs of job change. Being the first to empirically investigate the effect of UISA on employment duration, this paper...

The fiscal sustainability of state pensions is a central concern of policymakers in nearly every advanced economy. Policymakers have attempted to ensure the sustainability of these programs in recent decades by raising retirement ages. However, there are concerns that keeping older workers in...

This paper investigates the impact of minimum wages on employment and wages in Indonesian manufacturing firms between 1993 and 2006. It shows that within firms, the employment effects of minimum wage hikes is negative. It finds significant, negative employment effects of minimum wages among...

Japan's potential growth rate is steadily falling with the aging of its population. This paper explores the extent to which raising female labor participation can help slow this trend. Using a cross-country database we find that smaller families, higher female education, and lower marriage rates...