Participation in the informal economy has skyrocketed in China, coinciding with emerging labour markets that are segmented along lines of ethnicity, gender and migrant status. While a large body of literature examines migrant and female outcomes in the labour market, minority outcomes are much...

In this paper, we present a unified treatment of and explanation for the evolution of wages and employment in the U.S. over the last 30 years. Specifically, we account for the pattern of changes in wage inequality, for the increased relative wage and employment of women, for the emergence of the...

The recession caused by the COVID-19 crisis has features that could disproportionately harm female employment. Risk of infection and social distancing measures may have disrupted jobs in face-to-face industries, which have traditionally hired more women than men. School closures and a consequent...

What is the impact of the minimum wage on the college wage premium? I show that job-ladder models imply that the effect should be small on impact---raising only the wages of workers bound by the minimum wage---and grow over time as workers slowly move up the job ladder. Guided by my theory, I...

A key feature of developing economies is that wages in agriculture are significantly below those of other sectors. Using Brazilian household surveys and administrative panel data, I use information on workers who switch sectors to decompose this gap. I find that most of the gap is explained by...

This paper concerns the labour market differences among the 77 districts of the Czech Republic. There was a remarkable trend of increasing regional labour market differentiation in the 1990's, however, the patterns of differentiation have stabilised since then. The first part of the paper aims...

Indonesia has been experiencing impressive economic growth and rapid urbanization in recent years. However, urbanization could affect income inequality through people's movement from rural to urban areas. Using the 2010 National Labor Force Survey (Sakernas) in Indonesia, this study examines how...

We present new evidence on the wage and mobility of young and old workers, which is difficult to explain using standard human capital theory. Instead, we propose a simple dynamic extension of the Roy model, where worker migration and wages are jointly determined at the individual level....

Indonesia has been experiencing impressive economic growth and rapid urbanization in recent years. However, urbanization could affect income inequality through people's movement from rural to urban areas. Using the 2010 National Labor Force Survey (Sakernas) in Indonesia, this study examines how...

Since 1980 skilled and unskilled workers have increasingly sorted into different cities. In this paper we propose and quantify a novel driver of increased spatial sorting — diverging preferences over location attributes caused by diverging incomes across skill groups. The root cause of these...