During the past 20 years, Morocco has implemented a wide range of macroeconomic, social, and labor market reforms that have delivered in terms of growth of gross domestic product and household welfare. Yet, these positive developments are not reflected by the main labor market indicators, a...

In many regions of the world, the persistent, and growing, proportion of young people who are currently not in employment, education, or training is of global concern. This is no less true of Morocco: about 30 percent of the Moroccan population between ages 15 and 24 are currently not in...

This paper is the first to quantify the relationship between the incidence of the digital economy and long-term frictional unemployment across countries. The resulting evidence indicates that there is a robust, negative partial correlation between national unemployment rates and the incidence of...

This paper presents evidence on how the provision of unreliable electricity constrains expansion in the productive sectors of the economy, consequently leading to a reduction in the number of employment opportunities in Africa. Using geodata on electricity transmission networks on the continent,...

The impact of immigration on native workers is driven by two countervailing forces: the degree of substitutability between natives and immigrants, and the increased demand for native workers as immigrants reduce the cost of production and output expands. The literature so far has focused on the...

Did unemployment in the Great Recession hurt people's health? The broad answer is no: job losses have statistically insignificant impacts on mortality. The exogenous sources of job losses in a U.S. county is the tradable job losses driven by external demand collapses during the Great Recession....

This paper explores the spillover effects of job losses via input linkages during the Great Recession. Exploiting exogenous variation in tradable employment shocks across U.S. counties, the paper finds that job losses in the tradable sectors cause further job losses in local supporting services....

This paper provides empirical evidence for the Keynesian demand-driven propagation: initial rounds of job losses lead to additional rounds of job losses. The paper shows that U.S. counties with higher pre-existing exposure to tradable industries experienced larger job losses in non-tradable...

This paper studies the incidence and determinants of episodes of drastic unemployment reduction, defined as swift, substantial, and sustained declines in unemployment. Forty-three episodes are identified over a period of nearly three decades in 94 rich, middle-income, and transition countries....

Workfare schemes impose work requirements on beneficiaries. This has seemed an attractive idea for self-targeting transfers to poor people. This incentive argument does not imply, however, that workfare is more cost-effective against poverty than even poorly-targeted options, given hidden costs...