In many countries, non-compliance with minimum wage legislation is widespread, and authorities may be seen as having turned a blind eye to a legislation that they have themselves passed. But if enforcement is imperfect, how effective can a minimum wage be? And if non-compliance is widespread,...

Both raw intuition and past experience suggest that the success of an employment guarantee scheme (EGS) in safeguarding the welfare of the poor depends both on the wage it promises, and the ease with which any worker can gain access. An EGS is thus at once a wage guarantee and a rationing...

Fixed-term contract employment has increasingly replaced regular open-ended employment as the predominant form of employment notably in developing countries. Guided by factory-level evidence showing nuanced patterns of co-movements of regular and contract wages, we propose a two-tiered task...

Ethnic conflicts and their links to international human trafficking have recently received a surge in international attention. It appears that ethnic conflicts exacerbate the internal displacement of individuals from networks of family and community, and their access to economic and social...

Indoor air pollution (IAP)–predominantly from the use of solid fuel for cooking–is a global health threat, particularly for women and young children, and one of the leading causes of infant deaths worldwide in developing countries. We estimate the causal effect of cooking fuel choice on...

We present a model of offshoring of tasks to a developing nation, which is characterized by a minimum wage formal sector and a flexible wage informal sector. Some offshored tasks are outsourced by the formal sector to the lower wage informal sector. An improvement in the productivity in...

Canonical models of migration feature border enforcement as a strategy to contain undocumented immigration by effectively exacting a mobility cost. This paper revisits the role of border enforcement policy in a task-based model of the labor market where employers simultaneously hire circular...

This paper unpacks the role of the domestic content of imports as a novel source of policy interdependence along the global supply chain. We show how a rise in local contents embodied in imports can skew national trade policy preferences, and pull upstream and downstream countries in asymmetric...

We develop and estimate a theory-consistent gravity model for interregional migration flows in the presence of unemployment. Micro-founded in a setting where search friction regulates labor market transitions, we derive a migration gravity equation for bilateral mobility that embodies a...

This paper unpacks the effects of social networks on monthly county-level COVID19 vaccinations in the US. To parse out short-term community-level externalities where people help each other overcome immediate access barriers, from learning spillovers regarding vaccine efficacy that naturally take...