Some individuals work nearly full-time and most-year at low wages but remain poor. An effective way to assist the “working poor” is to supplement their earnings, which lifts them from poverty by rewarding their work. This paper explores how an earnings supplement program for British Columbia...

The principal means by which individuals and families achieve economic self-sufficiency is through labor market earnings. As a consequence, it is natural for policy makers to look to interventions that increase the ability of individuals and families to achieve an adequate standard of living...

Informal employment accounts for more than half of total employment in Latin America and the Caribbean, and an even higher percentage in Africa and South Asia. It is associated with lack of social insurance, low tax collection, and low productivity jobs. Lowering payroll taxes is a potential...

Using data from the 2006 Enterprise Census and Survey, the paper sheds light on why evasion and particularly under-reporting of wages is so common in Vietnam: only 46.4% of the enterprises are registered with social security, 21.7% of registered firms’ workers are not covered, and wages...

How much employment can be generated by decreasing payroll taxes? We examine this question by exploring the staggered rollout of a large payroll tax reform in Brazil. Using administrative matched employer-employee data, we find an increase of 5 percent on employment due to both firm growth and...