Like most other developing countries, China experiences huge migration outflows from rural areas. Their most striking characteristic is a high geographical and temporal mobility. Rural migrants keep going back and forth between origin villages and destination areas. In this paper, we show that...

In this paper we study the determinants of investment decisions at the firm level with heterogeneous capital goods. We exploit a newly developed panel dataset of small and medium-sized firms which allows us to distinguish between purchases, sales, and net acquisitions of capital goods. We...

Building upon a continuous-time model of search with Nash bargaining in a stationary environment, we analyze the effect of changes in minimum wages on labor market outcomes and welfare. While minimum wage increases invariably lead to employment losses in our model, they may be welfare-improving...

Most welfare programs generate high marginal tax rates on labor income. This paper uses a representative sample of individua ls on France's main welfare program (the Revenu Minimum d'Insertion, or RMI) to estimate monetary gains to employment for welfare recipients. This is based on the...

We examine the earnings determinants of the self-employed and wage earners in Hungary in the mid-1990's, taking into account two forms of selection: selection into working or nonworking for every individual in our sample and selection into self-employment or wageearning jobs for workers only....

We present a structural model of firm growth, learning, and survival and consider its identification and estimation. In the model, entrepreneurs have private and possibly errorridden observations of persistent and transitory shocks to profit. We demonstrate that the model's parameters can be...

In this paper, we estimate the difference in long-run after-tax and transfer income from employment and from non-employment available in January 1998 to families in France that received the Guaranteed Minimum Income (RMI) in December 1996. Based on estimated wages we compute potential increases...

I study the effects of service offshoring on white-collar employment, using highly disaggregated occupational data for the U.S.. I present a structural model of the firm's behavior that allows tractable derivation of labor demand elasticities for highly detailed occupations. I estimate the model...

In this paper we investigate whether unemployment traps exist and are significant in the transition from unemployment into employment in Belgium. In order to assess them, we use panel data sample selection models. Specifically, we estimate a parametric random effects models composed by a wage...

The paper studies the degree of homogeneity of innovative behavior in order to determine empirically an industry classification of Dutch manufacturing that can be used for policy purposes. We use a twolimit tobit model with sample selection, which explains the decisions by business enterprises...