In this paper, we set up a two-country general equilibrium model where trade unions have wage bargaining power. We show that a decrease in trade distortions inducing further product market integration gives rise to specialization gains as well as a labour market reform effect. The implications...

Despite witnessing a decade of rapid economic growth, an acceleration of growth in the organised manufacturing sector has eluded India. Using data from the An nual Survey of Industries, we examine the factors holding back the growth of output and employment in this sector. We find that there are...

The paper begins with a discussion of Indian labour law and the increasing use of "contract labour" in Indian formal manufacturing. We question the widespread perception that employment of contract labour provides flexibility to employers in terms of adjustment in response to demand and...

One particularly significant piece of labour legislation in India is the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 (CLA,1970), which regulates labour hired by firms through the offices of a labour contractor - such labour being referred to as 'contract' labour in India. This paper...

This paper studies the effect of mandated severance pay in a matching model featuring wage rigidity for ongoing, but not new, matches. Mandated severance pay matters only if binding real wage rigidities imply inefficient separation under employment at will. In such a case, large enough severance...

This paper attempts to identify and examine labor intensive industries in the organized manufacturing sector in India in order to understand their employment generation potential. Using the data from the Annual Survey of Industries (Government of India, various issues), the labor intensity for...

This study attempts to address the issue of declining labour intensity in India’s organized manufacturing in order to understand the constraints on employment generation in the labour intensive sectors. Using primary survey data covering 252 labour intensive manufacturing-exporting firms...

This paper challenges the traditional view that unemployment is high because insiders determine the union wage. The insiders in this paper are characterized by being more efficient when they search for a job than the outsiders, implying that they experience relatively less unemployment. We...

This survey reviews the recent literature on the double-dividend hypothesis of environmental taxes and discusses some extensions of the standard model such as the distributional consequences and the importance of the non-separability assumption between consumption goods and environmental quality...