Social programs can reduce productivity and growth as they inadvertently generate perverse incentives for workers and firms. The core hypothesis is that these programs segment the labor market, tax formal salaried employment and subsidize informal salaried and non-salaried employment. Larger...

Despite its exclusion from the Doha agenda, the issue of labor standards remains anintensely discussed subject among economists, policymakers, international agencies and nongovernmental organizations. In the past few years, both World Trade Organization (WTO) and International Labor Organization...

Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of...

Men and women sit at desks and tables in an office interior. Most work at typewriters. A woman at the left operates a duplicating machine, possibly a mimeograph machine. A woman in the background talks on the telephone. A boy in the right background wears a uniform including a cap that reads:...

These are lecture notes for the article "Technological Progress and Economic Transformation," in the Handbook of Economic Growth, 2005, v. 1B, edited by Philippe Aghion and Steven N. Durlauf. Amsterdam: Elsevier North-Holland, pp. 1225-1273.

This paper studies the effects of cash versus in-kind transfers on child labor. Using data from a program which randomly transferred either cash or a basket of food to poor households in Mexico, I fi nd that the cash transfer reduced children’s work participation by a signifi cantly larger...

One way to measure the lower steady state equilibrium outcome in human capital development is the incidence of child labor in most of the developing countries. With the help of Indian household level data in an overlapping generation framework, we show that production loans under credit...

An algorithm is presented for constructing from the adjacency matrix of a digraph the matrix of its simple n -sequences. In this matrix, the i, j entry, i ≠ j , gives the number of paths of length n from a point v i to a point v j ; the diagonal entry i, i gives the number of cycles of length...

This paper presents a new stochastic multidimensional scaling vector threshold model designed to analyze “pick any/ n ” choice data (e.g., consumers rendering buy/no buy decisions concerning a number of actual products). A maximum likelihood procedure is formulated to estimate a joint space...

In many regression applications, users are often faced with difficulties due to nonlinear relationships, heterogeneous subjects, or time series which are best represented by splines. In such applications, two or more regression functions are often necessary to best summarize the underlying...