Public debate on the temporary employment services, or labour broker, sector in South Africa has focused on temporary workers' wages and benefits. Empirical research is limited: temporary employment services cannot be accurately identified in recent labour force surveys. In 2015, South Africa...

Attempts to regulate the temporary employment sector have had mixed results internationally. In South Africa, temporary employment was regulated in 2015 through amendments to the Labour Relations Act. This paper uses administrative data to examine the short-term impact of strengthening...

This paper provides evidence on the nature of returns to education in Ghana and confirms the emerging empirical literature on the convexity of returns to education in Ghana. Using a basic Mincerian, model we find that returns to education more than triples from primary to secondary level or...

The paper investigates the differences in private marginal returns to education between wage-employees and the self-employed in Uganda, using the Mincerian framework with pooled regression models. We use a two-wave household panel to estimate homogenous and heterogeneous private returns to...

This paper is related to the literature on the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the labour market of host countries. Labour market literature has focused on the demand side of FDI; that is, increasing wage inequality by demanding more skilled workers or just increasing the overall...

This doctoral thesis analyses the impact of education and other determinants on labour market outcomes using microeconometric methods. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction. Chapter 2 uses a randomised field experiment among German human resource managers to evaluate which skill signals such as...

Most studies focus on trade effects and organizational outcomes of international standards, neglecting the effect of standards on employees. Using a two-year matched firm-employee panel dataset, this paper finds that the application of standards improves work conditions in small and medium...

Lea Immel prepared this study while she was working at the Research Group Taxation and Fiscal Policy at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical...

This paper studies the incidence and heterogeneity of labour informality in six Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru. We divide workers into five work statuses: formal wage-employed, formal self-employed, upper-tier informal wageemployed, lower-tier...

In many developing countries the skill base is a cause of concern with respect to international competition. Firm-provided training is generally seen as an important tool for bridging the skills gap between labour force and private sector demand. Yet little is known about how successful such...