Although it is a common theoretical assumption that the chances to find a job fall with time in unemployment, this is not systematically confirmed by empirical evidence, and there is no evidence for developing countries. We develop a framework that allows us to test the four major explanations...

The paper uses the Lewis model as a framework for examining the labour market progress of two labour-abundant countries, China and South Africa, towards labour shortage and generally rising labour real incomes. In the acuteness of their rural-urban divides, forms of migrant labour, rapid...

With around 50% of the urban men between age 15 and 30 unemployed, Ethiopia has one of the highest unemployment rates worldwide. This paper describes the nature of unemployment among young men in urban Ethiopia. We analyse the determinants of incidence and duration and find that most variables...

The added worker effect states that unemployment of a household member leads to an increase in labour supply of another household member. This paper investigates whether there is such an effect in a developing country. We use a rich data set for urban Ethiopia. We first give a brief description...

We investigate why we observe non-negative duration dependence among young unemployed men in urban Ethiopia. Assuming that genuine duration dependence is negative, there are five explanations for a non-decreasing hazard: the presence of unemployment benefits, the existence of Active Labour...

A large amount of recent evidence finds a negative relationship between local unemployment and wages in OECD countries, a relationship christened a ‘wage curve’. This contradicts the conventional model of the labour market in which high unemployment regions have higher wages to compensate...