Although a high rate of urbanization and a high incidence of rural poverty are two distinct features of many developing countries, there is little knowledge of the effects of the former on the latter. Using a large sample of Indian districts from the 1983–1999 period, we find that urbanization...

Although the high rate of urbanization and the high incidence of rural poverty are two distinct features of many developing countries, we still do not know the effects of the former on the latter. We address this issue by exploring the mechanisms through which urbanization may alleviate rural...

Like many emerging economies, South Africa has identified exports as an engine for more inclusive, job-intensive growth. However, employment growth did not follow the substantial export growth that South Africa experienced in the 2000s. This paper uses a newly developed World Bank database-the...

This paper develops a novel methodology to measure the quantity of jobs and value of wages embodied in exports for a large number of countries and sectors for intermittent years between 1995 and 2011. The resulting Labor Content of Exports database allows the examination of the direct...

The empirical evidence on the impact of import competition on economic performance relies mainly on import tariff liberalization as the source of changes to competition. This paper extends this evidence by focusing on non-tariff measures, an increasingly important trade policy tool globally. The...

This paper studies how productivity and markups respond to non-tariff measures. The analysis uses a novel time-varying data set on all non-tariff measures applied to imported products by Indonesia. Price and quantity information is used to disentangle the impact of non-tariff measures on plants'...

This paper provides novel evidence on the economic impact of industrial automation in a large developing economy. It combines labor force survey and manufacturing plant-level data from Indonesia over 2008-15, when the country experienced a rapid increase in imports of robots. The findings show a...

This paper unveils a novel externality of product market regulation in the labor market. It shows theoretically and empirically that higher barriers to entry in product markets translate into higher labor market power, measured by the wage markdown-the ratio between the marginal product of labor...