"The authors employ propensity score matching and a traditional control function approach to examine the impact of participation in various societal institutions on microfirm performance in Mexico. They find that firms that participate in credit markets, receive training, pay taxes, and belong...

"Increases in international economic integration can lead to greater specialization according to comparative advantage, but also to the diffusion of skill-biased technologies. In developing countries characterized by relative abundance of unskilled labor, these factors can have opposite effects...

Firms entering and exiting a market contribute almost as much to employment changes as firms continuing in a market. As much effort should be made to understanding sensitivity to wage changes in entering and exiting firms as to understanding wage elasticities in continuing firms

Even accounting for the large variance induced by different estimation techniques, one probably cannot say much about the flexibility of different labor markets based on comparisons of the estimated elasticity of demand. Colombia, for example, which has severe restrictions on firing workers, has...

Data provide only mixed support for the idea that trade liberalization has an impact on own-wage labor demand elasticities. If globalization is making the lives of workers more insecure, it is probably working through some other mechanism

Conventional measures of project quality are not reliable indicators of the value of investments or employment components of emergency programs. The inclusion of these components has costs and benefits that must be somewhat subjectively weighed against those of a benchmark "smart" transfer that...