Labor market regulation is a controversial area of public policy in both developed and developing countries. Mainstream economic analysis traditionally portrays legal interventions providing for minimum wages, unemployment insurance and (often only a modicum of) employment protection as...

Various groups have been demanding that discussions of labor standards be included in all future trade negotiations. The press is full of stories of alleged exploitation of child labor and other employment abuses in developing countries and human rights groups have demanded that something be...

Halima is an 11-year-old girl who clips loose threads off of Hanes underwear in a Bangladeshi factory. She works about eight hours a day, six days per week. She has to process 150 pairs of underwear an hour. At work she feels “very tired and exhausted,” and sometimes falls asleep standing...

As labor provisions in regional trade agreements proliferate, critics contend that they are used for protectionist purposes. Existing categories of labor clauses lead to inconsistent empirical results. We propose and apply a new typology for labor clauses to all WTO-notified regional trade...

This paper estimates how compliance with national labor law and international labor standards within Jordan's garment exporting factories changed after the implementation of a transparency program that made compliance assessments publicly available. The estimation employs data from Better Work...

This paper uses a sample of over 9.5 million workers from 22 European countries to study the intertwined effects of digital technology and cross-border production links on workers' wellbeing. We compare the social effects of technological change exhibited by three types of innovation:...

This paper’s analysis of working conditions in Europe compares several aspects of job quality and wages, rather than relying on earnings as a sole indicator of workers’ well-being.We use a micro-level database of workers from 22 European countries to assess how global value chains (GVCs) and...

This paper investigates how involvement in Global Value Chains (GVCs) affects working conditions. We use linked employer-employee data from the Structure of Earnings Survey merged with industry-level statistics on GVCs based on the World Input-Output Database. The sample consists of almost 9...

Various groups have been demanding that discussions of labor standards be included in all future trade negotiations. The press is full of stories of alleged exploitation of child labor and other employment abuses in developing countries and human rights groups have demanded that something be...