This paper provides new evidence on the wage gap between informal and formal salary workers in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. We use rich datasets that allow us to define informality in a relatively comparable fashion across countries. We compute precise wage differentials by accounting for...

The informal sector plays an important role in the functioning of labor markets in emerging economies. To characterize better this highly heterogeneous sector, we conduct a distributional analysis of the earnings gap between informal and formal employment in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa,...

This article examines the overall effect of global value chains (GVCs) on labour market outcomes, namely wages and labour demand. The analysis exploits the World Input-Output Database (WIOD, 2016 release) covering 43 countries and 54 sectors from 2000 to 2014. GVC involvement is measured by the...

We introduce two simple new variants of the Jackknife Instrumental Variables (JIVE) estimator for overidentified linear models and show that they are superior to the existing JIVE estimator, significantly improving on its small sample bias properties. We also compare our new estimators to...

College graduates tend to earn more than non-graduates but it is difficult to ascertain how much of this empirical association between wages and college degree is due to the causal effect of a college degree and how much is due to unobserved factors that influence both wages and education (e.g....

This paper establishes that the rise in employer-provided training due to technological change has dampened the college wage premium. Using unique survey micro-data, I show that hightechnology firms provide more training overall, but the gap in training participation between high- and low-skill...

The Canadian labour market experienced a period of unprecedented turmoil following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze the main changes using standard labour force statistics and new data on job postings. Envisaging a phase of temporary severing of employment relationships followed by...

The empirical literature on employer learning assumes that employers learn about unobserved ability differences across workers as they spend time in the labor market. This article describes testable implications that arise from this basic hypothesis and how they have been used to quantify the...

We consider the effects of student ability, college quality, and the interaction between the two on academic outcomes and future earnings. Both ability and college quality strongly improve outcomes and earnings. We find little evidence to support the "mismatch" hypothesis that college quality...

Canada is increasingly looking to international students as a source of postsecondary tuition revenues and new immigrants. By 2014, international students accounted for 10% of graduates from Canadian postsecondary institutions, up from 3% in 2000, and 11% of new permanent residents, up from 7%...