We provide some of the first rigorous evidence on performance spillovers and social network in the workplace. The data we use are rather extraordinary - weekly data for rejection rates (proportion of defective output) for all weavers in a firm during a 12 months (April 2003-March 2004) period,...

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,...

Using a large representative German data set and various concepts of self-employment, this paper tests the jack-of-all-trades view of entrepreneurship by Lazear (AER 2004). Consistent with its theoretical assumptions we find that self-employed individuals perform more tasks and that their work...

Using a large data set for Germany, we show that both the raw and the unexplained gender earnings gap are higher in self-employment than in paid employment. Applying an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, more than a quarter of the difference in monthly self-employment earnings can be traced back to...

The labor market outcomes of ethnic minorities in advanced societies and their dependence on social relationships and membership in social networks are important empirical issues with significant policy consequences. We use detailed micro-data on multiple-origin ethnic minorities in England and...

This paper investigates the effect of a native spouse on the transitions into and out of entrepreneurship of male immigrants in the U.S. We find that those married to a native are less likely to start up a business compared to those married to an immigrant. This finding is robust when the...

Workers are embedded within a network of social relationships and can communicate through word-of-mouth. They can find a job either directly or through personal contacts. From this micro scenario, we derive an aggregate matching function that has the standard properties but fails to be...

We use a unique data of representative migrants and urban local workers in 15 Chinese cities to investigate entrepreneurship and credit constraints under labour market discrimination. We divide self employed into prefer to be self-employed and prefer to have a salaried job but cannot find one;...