In 1997, the French government put into effect a law that permanently exempted young French male citizens born after Jan 1, 1979 from mandatory military service while still requiring those born before that cutoff date to serve. This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to identify the...

European labour markets have known three major changes over the past three decades : the complexification of the technological environment, the growth of general education across the workforce, and rising unemployment. Taken together, do these facts reflect the inefficiency of schooling and...

At the heart of the Skill Biased Technical Change literature is a discussion of the temporal impact of technological change on wages. The narrative describes technological change as allowing for the increased codification of routine tasks which enables capital to become more easily substituted...

This paper estimates the returns to education in Guatemala, while attempting to account for self-employment and the presence of workers without monetary earnings in the economy, factors whose omission can potentially lead to sample selection bias. The analysis uses data from the Survey of Living...

This paper attempts to tackle the puzzle of why more Canadians choose community colleges over universities than their American counterparts, when previous research has suggested that the return to community college education is low in Canada. Using data from the Survey of Labour and Income...

This paper analyzes recent labor market developments in the Chilean economy. The evidence shows a booming labor market with strong job creation since 2010. Most of the jobs created during the past three years are quality jobs—that is, jobs with a written contract and whose employers have made...

Youth unemployment in South Africa is high. We investigate whether one of the reasons may be that the wages young people want or need are above those that they could reasonably expect to earn given their characteristics. Unlike previous work on the relationship between reservation wages and...

Wage inequality often creates much broader socio-economic inequality and may even accentuate them. For attaining equitable development convergence in wages and earnings is therefore desirable. This paper explores trends and patterns in wage differentials in India in the post reform period. Using...

The last decade has witnessed greater participation of women in the labour market, especially in new arenas of economic activity. While opportunities have increased, traditional biases against women still exist, both while accepting women as workers and while wage setting. This paper explores...

The paper applies modified Oaxaca-type analyses on the eighteen available waves of the British Household Panel Survey to decompose the wage gap among full time employees from either side of the North-South divide and identify its components that can be attributed to measurable worker- and labour...