Inequality in Mexico rose between 1989 and 1994 and declined between 1994 and 2010. We examine the role of market forces (demand and supply of labour by skill), institutional factors (minimum wages and unionization rate), and public policy (cash transfers) in explaining changes in inequality. We...

Income inequality in Mexico increased between 1989 and 1994; between 1994 and 2006, inequality declined; and, between 2006 and 2014, inequality was again on the rise. We apply decomposition techniques to analyse the proximate determinants of labour income inequality and fiscal incidence analysis to...

Inaccurate expectations of future wages are found in many contexts. Yet, existing studies overwhelmingly refer to high-income countries, and there is little evidence regarding the sources of expectational errors. Based on a longitudinal survey of graduates from the six largest universities in...

Data on female labour force participation in Bangladesh suggest that, despite the increase in female-intensive employment opportunities through microfinance, export garment manufacturing, and community-based services, the majority of working women are concentrated in home-based activities. There...

This paper explores the link between entrepreneurship and child human capital development. We specifically examine how operating a non-farm enterprise (NFE) as opposed to working in agriculture relates to child labour and schooling outcomes. Accounting for timeinvariant unobservable...

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...

Using decomposition methods, we analyse the role of the changing nature of work in explaining changes in employment, wage inequality, and job polarization in Chile from 1992 to 2017. Changes in occupational structure confirm a displacement of workers from low-skill occupations towards jobs...

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...

We use a recent first-hand linked employer-employee survey covering the formal sector of Bangladesh to explain gender wage gaps by the inclusion of measures of cognitive attainment and personality traits. Our results show that cognitive skills have greater explanatory power than personality...