This paper assesses labor market segmentation across formal and informal salaried jobs and self-employment in three Latin American and three transition countries. It looks separately at the markets for skilled and unskilled labor, inquiring if segmentation is an exclusive feature of the latter....

This paper examines the performance of minimum wage legislation in Kenya, both in terms of its coverage and enforcement as well as in terms of their implications for wages and employment. Our findings based on the 1998/99 labor force data - the last labor force survey available - indicate that...

Using manufacturing data for India, this paper studies the economic effects of legal amendments on two types of labor laws: employment protection and labor dispute resolution legislation. We find that laws that increase employment protection or the cost of labor disputes substantially reduce...

Using firm level data on 70,000 enterprises in 107 countries, this paper finds important effects of access to finance, business regulations, corruption, and to a lesser extent, infrastructure bottlenecks in explaining patterns of job creation at the firm level. The paper focuses on how the...

This paper examines the economic effects of employment protection legislation in a sample of developed and developing countries. By implementing a difference-in-differences test, we lessen the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country regressions....

This paper examines a much overlooked link between credit markets and formalization: since access to bank credit typically requires compliance with tax and employment legislation, firms are more likely to incur such formalization costs once bank credit is more widely available at lower cost; if...