Labour market flexibility is often portrayed as a key to the competitive success of the UK and US economies. We surveyed several hundred firms in the UK, and using the resulting data (on over 200 manufacturing firms) this paper investigates the relationships between firms' use of flexible work...

In this paper, we use a three-period panel of Tanzanian households to explore the determinants of earnings and earnings growth from 2004 to 2006. In doing so, we draw particular attention to the role of education and to the importance of heterogeneity between more and less formal occupations....

We explore the role of reciprocity in wage determination by combining experimentaland survey data. The experiment is similar to Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe's (1995) and is conducted with Ghanaian manufacturing workers. The survey relates to the same sample workers and the firms within which they...

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 ofunemployment among young men in urban Ethiopia. We analyse the determinants ofincidence and duration and find that most variables...

Using matched employer-employee data on 10 African countries, this paper examines the relationship beween wages, worker supervision, and labor productivity in manufacturing. Wages increase with firm size for both production workers and supervisors. We develop a two-tier model of supervision that...

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 heterogeneous demographic composition of South African households means that the way that household income or expenditure is converted into an individual-level welfare measure is likely to matter. This paper examines the monetary and time costs of the most common economic dependents in...

Labour ‘flexibility’ is often portrayed as important to competitive success. Using evidence from an original survey of UK firms, this paper investigates the relationships between firms' use of, on the one hand, various flexible work practices, human resource management techniques, and...

In this paper, we develop an optimal control model of labor allocation in two types of economy - one economy is for innovative workers and the other one for knowledge workers. In both economies, workers allocate time between learning and discovering new knowledge. Both markets consist of a...

Recent experimental literature in labor economics shows that fairness concerns make a substantial difference for working decisions. Our study systematically explores how the existence of multiple fairness foci influences wage setting and acceptance thresholds. Particularly, we focus on the...