The self-employed constitute a large proportion of the workforce in developing countries and the sector has been found to be growing further. Different accounts exist as to the cause of this development, with pull factors such as high returns to capital and increased wealth contrasted with push...

The self-employed constitute a large proportion of the workforce in developing countries and the sector has been found to be growing further. Different accounts exist as to the cause of this development, with pull factors such as high returns to capital and increased wealth contrasted with push...

In Venezuela, the informal sector has increased its participation in the labor market remarkably. Poverty levels of workers in the informal sector are higher than in the formal sector of the economy. Given the structure of the Venezuelan economy and the global trends, it is very unlikely that...

This paper examines the role of search and information frictions on wage dispersion. Job search costs are high in rural labor markets in developing countries. The flow of information on jobs and wages is limited, and wages tend to be dispersed. To lower search costs, I develop an SMS-based...

By providing 100 days of guaranteed employment to every rural household, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) can challenge the hegemony of the landed elite as major employers in the Indian countryside and raise market wages which have long been depressed. This paper shows that...

This paper proposes to explain the productivity growth slowdown with the poaching of disruptive inventors by firms these inventors threaten with their research. I build an endogenous growth model with incremental and disruptive innovation and an inventor labor market where this defensive...

By providing 100 days of guaranteed employment to every rural household, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) can challenge the hegemony of the landed elite as major employers in the Indian countryside and raise market wages which have long been depressed. This paper shows that...

This paper proposes to explain the productivity growth slowdown with the poaching of disruptive inventors by firms these inventors threaten with their research. I build an endogenous growth model with incremental and disruptive innovation and an inventor labor market where this defensive...

This paper proposes a model that explains both recently documented facts about the decline of disruptive innovation and the decline in productivity growth as the result of large firms trying to monopolize technologies by poaching inventors from disruptive activities. To come to this conclusion,...

This paper uses a firm-specific method for measuring monopsonistic behavior developed by Brummund (2012) using data for Chilean manufacturing plants for the period 2001-2006. We find that there is significant heterogeneity in labor market power across plants and that nearly a quarter of the...