We find that women sorting into lower wage firms explains nearly half of the gender wage gap in South Africa, using matched employer-employee panel data covering the universe of formal sector workers. Sorting varies considerably over the life cycle: the firm-wage gender gap is negligible for the...

This paper explores two policy interventions in Zambia, a minimum wage hike in 2018 and an upward revision in the first kink in the progressive income tax schedule in 2017, to examine and compare the impact of minimum wage and tax kink changes on wages and the earnings distribution in the formal...

Using administrative tax records from South Africa for the period 2011-14, I find that firm wage premia explain 25 per cent of the total wage variance, 60 per cent of the gender wage gap, and 40 per cent of the gap between workers in the middle and the bottom of the income distribution. Next, I...

How does centralized bargaining affect the broader wage structure? And what does this tell us about the (non-)competitive dynamics of such labour markets? I study large contracted wage increases negotiated by centralized bargaining councils in South Africa, using matched employer- employee tax...

Frequent electricity outages threaten to impede the benefits of expanded access achieved by many developing countries in recent decades. A large literature documents these negative effects, however almost none consider labour market effects. This paper merges labour force survey microdata with...

This paper studies the decline of the labour share in Mexico during the period 1990-2015. It calculates the wage share and alternative measures of the labour income share (which includes labour income of the self-employed) for the whole economy, the private business sector, and its major...

Traditionally, analysts of the South African labour market have used household survey data to describe earnings and employment in the post-Apartheid period. More recently, administrative data from the South African Revenue Service has been made available, which allows for comparisons and an...

In this paper we investigate the links between wage inequality and the changing nature of jobs in a revolution context. The methodology consists of various decompositions and regressions, including recentred influence function regressions, based on Tunisian labour force surveys from the past 20...

Low- and middle-income countries face a trade-off between raising tax revenue to strengthen social protection and creating incentives for the population to enter formal employment. However, empirical evidence on labour supply elasticities in the presence of informal employment remains scarce....

The issue of employer power is underemphasized in the development literature. The default model is usually one of competitive labour markets. This assumption matters for analysis and policy prescription. There is growing evidence that the competitive labour markets assumption is not valid for...