This paper uses a unique dataset of both public and private sector primary school teachers and their students to present among the first estimates in a low-income country of (a) teacher effectiveness; (b) teacher value added (TVA) and its correlates; and (c) the link between TVA and teacher...

This paper uses a large national household panel from 1999/2000 and 2007/08 to analyze the short-term effects of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme on wages, labor supply, agricultural labor use, and productivity. The scheme prompted a 10-point wage increase and...

This paper offers evidence on the relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment and informal employment, and identifies some of the lessons learned on the potential effects of increasing the minimum wage. Most of the evidence suggests that sizable increases in the minimum wage are...

Building on recent analyses that find a sizeable overall gender wage gap in Azerbaijan's workforce, this paper uses data on young workers in their early years in the labor market to understand how gender wage gaps evolve over time, if at all. The paper uses a unique database from a survey of...

Technical education and training has been dramatically expanding in Brazil recently. However, there remains no evidence on the cost effectiveness of this alternative track to a more general education. This paper quantifies the wage returns of completing technical and vocational education and...

Drawing on a new set of nationally representative, internationally comparable household surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation-labor allocation and labor productivity-in four African economies. New, micro-based measures of sector labor allocation...

This paper analyzes recent trends in Sweden's labor market regulations in relation to comparator economies and examines the relationship between labor market regulations and outcomes. The paper finds that the Swedish labor market responded more rapidly to the recent global financial crisis than...

The many and varied crises in the world economy since 2007 seem to have different origins and iverse manifestations. This paper contends that there is however a structural shift beneath the global economy that is now reaching a critical mass, and that accounts for many of these crises, despite...

Over the past 30 years, Vietnam has experienced significant shifts of employment away from agriculture toward manufacturing and services, away from household enterprises toward registered and regulated businesses, and away from state-owned enterprises toward private firms. This paper argues that...

In Latin America, labor markets have been the main channel through which growth has reduced poverty, with higher labor income accounting for 49 percent of the reduction in poverty in 2008-13. Understanding labor markets is critical to designing policies and programs aimed at reducing poverty....