Child labor is a common consequence of economic shocks in developing countries. We show how reducing vulnerability can affect child labor and schooling. We exploit the extension of a health and accident insurance scheme by a Pakistani microfinance institution (MFI) that was set up as a...

Some studies on child labor have shown that greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient is an explicit modeling of the labor market. We develop a simple model which...

This paper empirically tests the role of search frictions in driving qualification mismatches in the labor market. Using new data from several low-income economies in urban Asia we find that overeducation in less developed labor markets are more pervasive than in more developed economies....

Trust and entrepreneurship are seen as key ingredients of long-term prosperity. However, it is not clear how these two are related. Part of the confusion can be traced back to the measurement of entrepreneurship, biased towards independent entrepreneurship (self-employed and new firms), and...

In the past several years, labor shortage in China has become an emerging issue. However, there is heated debate on whether China has passed the Lewis turning point and entered a new era of labor shortage from a period of unlimited labor supply. Most empirical studies on this topic focus on the...

A popular form of action to curb child labor and uphold international labor standards in general is a product boycott by consumers. There are labeling agencies that inform us if, for instance, a carpet or a hand-stitched soccer ball is free of child labor. The presence of a consumer boycott will...

Some studies on child labor have shown that, at the level of the household, greater land wealth leads to higher child labor, thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty. This paper argues that the missing ingredient may be an explicit modeling of the labor...

We incorporate a general model of frictions into the bunching-based elasticity estimator. This model relies on fewer parameters than the conventional approach, replacing bunching window bounds with a single "lumpiness parameter," while matching rich observed bunching patterns such as...

This paper investigates how HIV/AIDS has impacted the labor market in South Africa, focusing on its effect on wages and employment. This is done by matching individual level data with group specific cumulative AIDS mortality rates. Exploiting the panel nature of the data, I remove individuals...

This comment provides a critical evaluation of Blanchflower's (2004) survey of various aspects of self-employment and his overall normative conclusion that "more may not be better". In order to draw normative conclusions regarding the optimal level of self-employment a number of issues ignored...