This paper provides new evidence on the wage gap between informal and formal salary workers in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. We use rich datasets that allow us to define informality in a relatively comparable fashion across countries. We compute precise wage differentials by accounting for...

The low unemployment rates traditionally enjoyed by Sweden have often been attributed to the country's extensive system of active labour market programmes, which have thus frequently been regarded as a model for other countries to emulate. However, unemployment grew enormously in Sweden when the...

The paper evaluates the differential performance of the six main types of Swedish programmes that were available to adult unemployed workers en Titled to unemployment benefits in the 1990s: labour market training, workplace introduction, work experience placement, relief work, trainee...

This paper examines the empirical analysis of treatment effects on duration outcomes from data that contain instrumental variation. We focus on social experiments in which an intention to treat is randomized and compliance may be imperfect. We distinguish between cases where the treatment starts...

Household composition can be expected to affect the allocation of household expenditure among goods, at the very least because of economies of scale as household size increases and because different people have different needs (adults versus children, for example). Specifying demographic effects...

The New Deal For Young People is the major welfare-to-work program in the UK. It is a mandatory multistage policy targeted at the 18-24 year old unemployed. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the program in terms of enhancing the (re)employment probability of participant males. I...

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

Relative wages vary considerably across regions of the United Kingdom, with skill-abundant regions exhibiting lower skill premia than skill-scarce regions. This paper shows that the location of economic activity is correlated with the variation in relative wages. U.K. regions with low skill...

This paper analyzes the impact of load factor, facility and generator types on the productivity of Korean electric power plants. In order to capture important differences in the effect of load policy on power output, we use a semiparametric smooth coefficient (SPSC) model that allows us to model...

This paper models total factor productivity (TFP) in space and proposes an empirical model for TFP interdependence across spatial locations. The interdependence is assumed to occur due to age-structured human capital dynamics. A semi-parametric spatial vector autoregressive framework is...