Using firm-level data from nine developing countries we demonstrate that (a) certain institutions like restrictive labour market regulations that are considered to be bad for economic growth might be beneficial for production efficiency, whereas (b) good business environment which is considered...

Using data on team assignment and weekly output for all weavers in an urban Chinese textile firm between April 2003 and March 2004, this paper studies a) how randomly assigned teammates affect an individual worker's behavior under a tournament-style incentive scheme, and b) how such effects...

This paper considers labor market adjustments following a large import shock in the German clothing industry caused by the phasing out of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement. Using the German shoe industry as a control group and administrative data, we study adjustments on the individual and firm level...

This paper uses an oligopoly model with heterogeneous firms to examine how an industry adjusts to rising import competition. The model predicts that in the short run the least efficient firms in the industry become inactive, surviving firms face a fall in output, mark-ups and profits, and the...

This paper focuses on how the forces of globalisation, specifically the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), have affected women's wages in the apparel sector in developing countries. Using household and labour force surveys from Cambodia and Sri Lanka, we find large positive wage premiums and a...

We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from...

We measure the impact of individuals' looks on their life satisfaction or happiness. Using five data sets from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, we construct beauty measures in different ways that allow putting a lower bound on the true effects of beauty on happiness. Personal beauty...

We employ a behavioural measure of trustworthiness obtained from an experiment carried out with a sample of the general British population whose individuals were extensively interviewed on earlier occasions. These previous interviews allow us to have very good income measures, and in particular...

This paper presents the first empirical evidence on the effect of the threat of unionisation on the use of a predominantly non-union type of employment, i.e. temporary employment. The identification strategy exploits an exogenous variation in union threat induced in the UK by new legislation...

In this paper we reevaluate the returns to education based on the increase in the compulsory schooling age from 14 to 15 in the UK in 1947. We provide a Bayesian fuzzy regression discontinuity approach to infer the effect on earnings for a subset of subjects who turned 14 in a narrow window...