This paper shows that the factors affecting labor supply have been key determinants of the changes in employment, unemployment, and income differentials in Latin America in the 1990s. The two main forces driving labor supply in the region have been demographics and education.

Inflation can "grease" the wheels of the labor market by relaxing downward wage rigidity but it can also increase uncertainty and have a negative "sand" effect. This paper studies the grease effect of inflation by looking at whether the interaction between inflation and labor market regulations...

This paper analyzes the recent performance of Latin American labor markets. We find that unemployment rates are on the rise in most countries and sub-regions of Latin America. The rise in unemployment over the 1990s is not driven by a higher proportion of women, adults or urban workers in the...

The author identifies sources of volatility in Argentina that include weak international financial links, a recurrent credit crunch and financial underdevelopment problem, a fragile fiscal situation, and a pervasive profit and collateral squeeze mechanism brought about by a rigid labor market...

Estimating the response of hours worked to technology shocks is often considered as a crucial step for evaluating the applicability of macroeconomic models to reality. In particular, Galí [1999] has considered the conditional correlation between employment and productivity as a key tool for...

Three well-known aggregate regularities (i.e. Beveridge, Wage, and Okun's curves) seem to provide a quite complete picture of the interplay between labor market macro-dynamics and business cycle. Nevertheless, existing theoretical literature still lacks micro-founded models which are able to...

Empirical evidence suggests that networks of personal relations are important in the micro dynamics of labor markets: even in modern capitalistic economies a high share of jobs are filled by social referrals. This paper aims at shedding light on an apparent puzzle concerning the relationship...

Why do not people evade more taxes when their gain from evasion is higher than the expected penalties? Why does only a small minority evade when a large majority is willing to? These tax evasion puzzles are explained in a labour market framework where employees may combine reported work in firms...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the length of poverty spells and its determinants. We analyze if short-term changes in the labor market affect the probability of staying in poverty. On the assumption that poverty transitions occur more frequently when we use a monthly data rather than...