This paper studies the evolution of the rural non-farm sector in India and its contribution to the decline of poverty. It scrutinizes evidence from a series of nationally representative sample surveys and confronts findings from these sources against the experience of poverty decline in a...

A century has passed since the first call for a British national minimum wage (NMW). That remarkable Fabian tract discussed wage setting, coverage, monopsony, international labour standards, inspection and compliance and the interaction between the NMW and the social security system. The NMW was...

I study the role of company start-up costs for employment performance. The model is search equilibrium with a new concept for firms. Agents have an innate managerial ability and make a career choice to become either managers or workers. Manage rs set up firms, post jobs and match with workers. I...

Growth of 'global cities' in the 1980s was supposed to have involved an occupational polarisation, including growth of low paid service jobs. Though held to be untrue for European cities, at the time, some such growth did emerge in London a decade later than first reported for New York. The...

As India integrates into the global economy, its villages are integrating into a rapidly growing urban economy. One of the links through which this is happening is labour markets, where demand for labour to undertake non-farm jobs has been growing. This has led to a rise in the share of non-farm...

This article reports upon aspects of a small-scale qualitative study of low-income working families. The study was conducted in the context of recent policy changes in Britain that are intended to promote labour force participation by low-income parents, especially mothers. It is argued that...

This paper creates a pseudo cohort of individuals who left school in the mid-1990s, using Labour Force Survey. The extent of low achievement at school amongst this group is documented, and then the impact of such low achievement on labour force status is estimated. The main focus of the paper is...

This paper examines the response of industries and firms to changes in trade costs. Several new firm-level models of international trade with heterogeneous firms predict that industry productivity will rise as trade costs fall due to the reallocation of activity across plants within an industry....

This paper estimates the impact of road improvements on firm employment and productivity using plant level longitudinal data for Britain. Exposure to transport improvements is measured by changes in employment accessibility along the road network. These changes are constructed using data on...

This paper investigates the overlap between employment status and poverty, drawing particular attention to the working poor and precarious workers, and to the existence of multiple labor-related risks faced by specific groups. This analysis is undertaken using the Kyrgyz Poverty Monitoring...