Sri Lanka's Termination of Employment of Workmen Act (TEWA) requires that firms with 15 or more employees justify layoffs and provide generous severance pay to displaced workers, with smaller firms being exempted. Athough formally subject to TEWA, firms in Export Processing Zones (EPZs) may have...

The distortion in educational investment in poorer children is often attributed to credit market imperfections and hence to the unequal access of children to educational opportunity. However, the distortion might also be attributable to disincentive effects that cause children to make...

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision-making by local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most of the variation in local...

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision-making by local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most of the variation in local...

 Over the past 45 years, meatpacking has shifted from a predominantly urban to a predominantly rural industry. Meatpacking plants can represent a significant share of a rural community’s employment. As a traditional employer of immigrants, these plants can also alter significantly the...

Using data on licensing of registered nurses (RNs) in Iowa and results of a labor-market survey sent to a subsample of the database, we investigate the factors influencing the decision to renew a nursing license or not. A disproportionate share of those who donï¾’t renew do so due to...

This study develops a model of occupational and educational choices. Individuals are assumed to choose careers based on expected utility maximization, given uncertainty concerning future earnings. The model directly leads to estimable equations relating career choices to the moments of...

We propose a strategy to identify the complementarity or substitutability among technology bundles. Under the assumption that alternative technologies are independent, we develop a hypothetical distribution of multiple technology adoptions. Differences between the observed distribution of...

Variation in income tax policies and health insurance costs are shown to be theoretically appropriate instruments to identify endogenous firm wage and benefit offers in a labor supply model. Empirical results show that firms are more likely to provide health insurance benefits in states with...

An empirical model of joint decisions of where to live and where to work demonstrates that individuals make residential and job location choices by trading off wages, housing prices and commuting costs. Wages are higher in metropolitan markets, but housing prices are also higher in urban areas....