Inadequacies in Tanzania's education and training systems compromise the quality of workforce skills, giving rise to skill shortages, and constraining the operations and growth of formal sector firms in the country. This study addressed these concerns using data from a unique Enterprise Skills...

This study evaluates the employment effects of a publicly-run national technical vocational education training program in Brazil that explicitly takes input from firms in determining the location, scale, and skill content of courses offered. Using exogenous course capacity restrictions, the...

Firms that provide on-the-job training do so when it is critical to their productivity -- and when productivity is critical to their survival. This paper begins by confirming a significant and positive return from on-the-job training on wages and productivity, as well as the presence of positive...

A number of developing countries are currently promoting vocational education and training (VET) as a way to build human capital and strengthen economic growth. The primary aim of this study is to understand whether VET at the high school level contributes to human capital development in one of...

This paper exploits variation in country-level indicators drawn from published data to analyze the relationship between labor regulation and the use of digital technology. The analysis shows a statistically and economically significant association between digital technology use by firms and a...

This paper investigates differences in the composition of employment between exporting and non-exporting firms. In particular, it asks whether exporting firms hire more engineers relative to blue-collar workers than non-exporting firms. In a stylized partial-equilibrium model, firms produce...

This paper examines the spatial organization of jobs in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, and applies the Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (2002) model to explain the observed patterns in terms of the agglomeration forces and the commuting costs of workers. The paper suggests that: (i) Economic...

The subject of which firms are the key employers?and which of these create or destroy jobs at a faster rate?is eminently important for academics and policy makers. The relative importance of small versus large firms and old versus young firms has in particular been extensively debated and...

This paper empirically studies the dynamics of labor market adjustment following the Brazilian trade reform of the 1990s. The paper uses variation in industry-speci?c tari? cuts interacted with initial regional industry mix to measure trade-induced local labor demand shocks and examines regional...

Romania faces an acute population crisis with an aging workforce and an increased number of emigrants particularly from the young, highly educated/skilled population. This paper uses a new cross-sectional data set of Romanian emigrants to find which factors are related to plans to return home...