Institutional and political characteristics affect the extent to which the real exchange rates of oil-exporting countries co-move with the oil price. In a simple theoretical model, good governance insulates real exchange rates from price volatility by generating a smoother pattern of fiscal...

This study compares average earnings and productivities for men and women employed in roughly 200,000 Chinese industrial enterprises. Women’s average wages lag behind men’s wages by 11%, and this result is robust to the inclusion of non-wage income in the form of social insurance payments....

Fifteen years after the introduction of highly ambitious social insurance programs for urban Chinese workers, a large number of them remain un-insured. This paper examines the relationship between labor market conditions and social insurance participation among industrial firms in the pre-crisis...

Many European countries have implemented policies to revive their domestic service sectors. A common goal of these reforms has been to create employment for disadvantaged groups on the domestic labor market. I evaluate a Swedish policy where domestic service firms receive a 50% tax deduction on...

Many European countries have implemented policies to revive their domestic service sectors. A common goal of these reforms has been to create employment for disadvantaged groups on the labor market. I study Sweden, where a 50% tax deduction on labor costs for domestic services was introduced in...

Preferential voting has been introduced in a number of proportional election systems over the last 20 years, mainly as a means to increase the accountability of individual politicians. But most of these reforms have been criticized as blatant failures. In this paper, we discover a genuinely new...

Efforts to increase female political representation are often thought to be at odds with meritocracy. This paper develops a theoretical framework and an empirical analysis to examine this idea. We show how the survival concerns of a mediocre male party leadership can create incentives for gender...