In the past 30 years Costa Rica has grown steadily and social indicators have improved markedly. Well-being indicators are comparable or even above the OECD average in several dimensions, such as health, environment or life-satisfaction. This paper reviews the social progress that Costa Rica has...

This paper explores informality in a high income country among women who, at least legally, can take on formal jobs. Specifically, we examine the determinants of paid domestic work in Israel through the lens of existing theoretical frameworks of informality. Using rich administrative data, we...

Gegenstand dieses Beitrages ist die Untersuchung des Mindestlohnes hinsichtlich seiner Auswirkungen auf die Beschäftigung in den theoretischen Modellen und empirischen Studien sowie der rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen und der Ursachen der Mindestlohndebatte.

We estimate the longer-run effects of minimum wages, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and welfare on key economic indicators of economic self-sufficiency in disadvantaged neighborhoods. We find that the longer-run effects of the EITC are to increase employment and to reduce poverty and public...

The working poor were long thought of as people toiling away in lousy, under-protected and underpaid jobs in places like fast-food joints, supermarkets, hotels and bars. The perfidious consequence of that perception was that in-work poverty was seen as a non-issue in countries with extensive...

This paper examines the macroeconomic interaction between informality and gender inequality in the labor market. A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model is built to study the impact of gender-targeted policies on female labor force participation, female formal employment, gender wage gap,...

Global GDP is more than 100 trillion dollars, yet 10% of the world's population still live in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 per day. No one should have to live like that: alleviating poverty is a minimal moral obligation implied by nearly every secular and religious moral system....