This paper provides causal evidence on the long-term legacies of postwar reconstruction and mandatory employment on women's family formation outcomes such as marriage, age at first marriage and divorce. We exploit city-by-cohort variation in the intensity of World War II reconstruction in...

Informal firms make up a major share of the economy in most developing countries. Expanding formalization could increase government tax revenues, boost firm profits and national income, and increase employee well-being by improving access to social security and health and workers’ benefits....

This paper explores the labor market, poverty, inequality and pro-poor growth dynamics in the recent economic crisis and recovery in Argentina. In the labor market it is possible to see the diverging experience of the economic crisis and recovery. For instance, the unemployed were more likely to...

This paper provides a detailed analysis of various dimensions of informality in the Mexican labor market. To understand the nature of informality in terms of regulations and compliance, the legalistic view, and in terms of productivity view of the labor market this paper makes an empirical...

Limited availability of workfare programs and unemployment insurance and a large informal sector are features of the Argentine labor market at the outset of the 2001 economic crisis. This paper tests the hypothesis whether informal work is an alternative to workfare participation before a...

This paper investigates a puzzle in the literature on labor markets in developing countries: labor legislations not only have an impact on the formal labor market but also an impact on the informal sector. It has even been argued that the impact on the informal sector in the case of the minimum...

This paper employs recently developed econometric models of marginal treatment effects to analyze the relevance of labor market comparative advantage and segmentation in the participation and earnings performance of workers in formal and informal jobs in Argentina. A novel household data set on...

Ethnic conflicts and their links to international human trafficking have recently received a surge in international attention. It appears that ethnic conflicts exacerbate the internal displacement of individuals from networks of family and community, and their access to economic and social...

We examine spending on consumption items which have signaling value in social interactions across groups with distinctive social identities in India, where social identities are defined by caste and religious affiliations. The classification of such items was done by eliciting responses to a...

Can the demographic trends of increased life expectancy and decreasing birth rates, along with the labor market patterns of returns to human capital investment and changes in real hourly earnings, account for changes in women's and men's lifetime earnings? Using a Vector Error Correction Model...