Applying quantile analysis to detailed firm-level data from Mexico, the authors study determinants of demand and wages for two classes of labor. Unions appear to have a strong impact on how much unskilled labor is employed but not on wages. This suggests an extreme example of"monopoly...

The authors present the first comparable dynamic panel estimates of labor demand elasticity, using data from Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. They examine the benefits, and limits of the Arellano, and Bond GMM in differences estimator, and the Blundell, and Bond GMM system estimator. They also...

Lederman and Maloney examine the empirical relationships between trade structure and economic growth, particularly the influence of natural resource abundance, export concentration, and intra-industry trade. They test the robustness of these relationships across proxies, control variables, and...

A long tradition sees the small firm sector as a holding pattern for workers queuing for jobs in the formal sector of a segmented labor market. An alternative"entrepreneurial"view suggests that many workers prefer self-employment to salaried jobs. These competing views can be resolved if the...

The informal microfirm sector is believed to be large, accounting for 20-40 percent of employment in many developing countries. The literature tends to view the sector as the disadvantaged sector of a segmented labor market, as existing to evade government regulations, or as constrained by lack...

Competing conceptions of the large, unprotected,"informal"workforce in developing countries differ greatly in their implications for the labor reform considered to be essential complements to trade liberalization and"fair"competition in international trade. Traditionally, the informal sector is...

There is a long tradition of viewing as disadvantaged the roughly 40 percent of workers in developing countries who are unprotected by labor legislation and work in small"informal"firms. The author offers an alternative to traditional views of the relationship between formal and informal labor...

The authors provide an overview of minimum wage levels in Latin America and their true impact on the distribution of wages, using both numerical measures and kernal density plots for eight countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, and Uruguay). They especially try...

This paper develops a framework for the quantitative analysis of individual income dynamics, mobility and welfare. Individual income is assumed to follow a stochastic process with two (unobserved) components, component representing measurement error or transitory income shocks and an...

Using a global panel on research and development (R&D) expenditures, this paper documents that on average poor countries do far less R&D than rich as a share of GDP. This is arguably counter intuitive since the gains from doing the R&D required for technological catch up are thought to be very...