The majority of enterprises in many developing countries have no paid workers. This paper reports on a field experiment conducted in Sri Lanka that provided wage subsidies to randomly chosen microenterprises to test whether hiring additional labor would benefit such firms. In the presence of...

The rise in unemployment during an economic crisis poses asignificant concern to policy makers. This paper measures the effect of a program in Mexico that granted firms in certain industries wage subsidies if they decided to keep their workers instead of letting them go during the recent...

This paper evaluates a youth internship program in the Republic of Yemen that provided firms with a 50 percent subsidy to hire recent graduates of universities and vocational schools. The first round of the program took place in 2014 and required both firms and youth to apply for the program....

Throughout the Middle East, unemployment rates of educated youth have been persistently high and female labor force participation, low. This paper studies the impact of a randomized experiment in Jordan designed to assist female community college graduates find employment. One randomly chosen...

This paper shows how Dutch disease effects may arise solely from a shift in demand following a natural resource discovery. The natural resource wealth increases the demand for non-tradable luxury services due to non-homothetic preferences. Labor that could be used to develop other non-resource...