This paper explores how the expansion of labor-intensive manufacturing exports resulting from the United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement in 2001 translated into wages of skilled and unskilled workers and the skill premium in Vietnam through the channel of labor demand. In order to...

A major concern with the rapid spread of technology is that it replaces some jobs, displacing workers. However, technology may raise firm productivity, generating more jobs. The paper contributes to this debate by exploiting a novel panel data set for Chilean firms in all sectors between 2007...

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...

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...

Using data on Israeli closures inside the West Bank, this paper provides new evidence on the labor market effects of conflict-induced restrictions to mobility. To identify the effects, the analysis exploits the fact that the placement of physical barriers by Israel was exogenous to local labor...

This paper reviews evidence from 44 middle-income countries on how the recent financial crisis affected jobs and workers' incomes. In addition to providing a rare assessment of the magnitude of the impact across several middle-income countries, the paper describes how labor markets adjusted and...

Do matching frictions affect youth employment in developing countries? This paper studies a randomized controlled trial of job fairs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The job fairs match firms with a representative sample of young, educated job-seekers. The meetings at the fairs create very few jobs:...

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 shows that reference letters from former employers alleviate information asymmetries about workers'skills and improve both match quality and equity in the labor market. A resume audit study finds that using a reference letter in the application increases callbacks by more than 60...

Over the past decade (2003-12), Latin America has experienced strong income growth and a notable reduction in income inequality, with the region's Gini coefficient falling from 55.6 to 51.8. Previous studies have warned about the sustainability of such a decline, and this paper presents evidence...