This study seeks to determine the impact on female labor outcomes of the amendment to the Colombian labor law that extended maternity leave from 12 to 14 weeks (Law 1468 of July 2011). To identify this impact, labor market outcomes of two groups of women with different fertility rates are...

One of the classic predictions of the urban economic theory is that high-income and low-income households choose different residential locations and therefore, conditional on workplace location, have different commuting patterns. Empirical tests of this theory are not standard, due to unobserved...

We test the effectiveness of team incentives by running a natural field experiment in a retail chain of 193 shops and 1,300 employees. As a response to intensified product market competition, the firm offered a bonus to shop teams for surpassing sales targets. A bonus to teams rather than...

Pacts for employment and competitiveness are an integral component of the ongoing process of decentralization of collective bargaining in Germany, a phenomenon that has been hailed as key to that nation's economic resurgence. Yet little is known about the effects of pacts on firm performance....

In this paper I apply Porto (2006) to Paraguay using household level data. The aim is to assess the distributional impact of the preferential and multilateral trade liberalization in a small member country. I also follow Nicita (2009) assuming incomplete pass-through on prices of traded goods...

What are the effects of firm- and sector-level trade unions on unemployment and aggregate output if individuals have rent-sharing motives? To answer this question, we extend a Melitz-type model to unionized labor markets. Because individual rent-sharing motives are only taken into account and...

The aim of this work is to analyze the evolution and the composition of the labor costs in the industrial sector in Brazil during the period between 1996 and 2012. The source of data is the Annual Survey of Mining and Manufacturing Industries (PIA) issued by the Brazilian Institute of Geography...

This note examines the extent and patterns of structural changes that have occurred in European economies during the recent crisis using some stylised facts on changing output and employment struc-tures at detailed sectoral level. Focusing mainly on the new EU member states, we compare the...

In 2002, the United Kingdom implemented the EU directive mandating equal treatment of fixed-term and permanent workers. This paper uses eleven years of data from the Labour Force Survey to assess whether the new legislation has led to a decrease in the average wage gap between fixed-term and...

This paper investigates the effects of an income guarantee on borrowing to smooth consumption and finance cultivation in a risky setting with marked seasonality. A three-season, infinite-horizon theoretical model is developed and analyzed. The insights yielded by the model are then used to...