Although it is widely accepted that financial development is associated with higher growth, the evidence on the channels through which credit affects growth at the microeconomic level is scant. Using data from a cross-section of Bulgarian firms, we estimate the impact of access to credit, as...

The paper tests for the existence of human capital externalities using a micro-level approach: the Mincerian wage regression augmented with the average level of education in cities. To solve identification problems arising from the endogeneity of average education, the study exploits a natural...

Over the past several decades, China has made tremendous progress in market integration and infrastructure development. Demand for natural resources has increased from the booming coastal economies, causing the terms of trade to favour the resource sector, which is predominantly based in the...

Transition has involved major job destruction and creation. This paper examines the skill content of these changes using a detailed three country firm survey. It shows that transition has exerted a strong bias against unskilled labour that has lost employment disproportionately. The skill...

We use firm-level data to analyze male-female wage discrimination in China's industry. We find that there is a significant negative association between wages and the share of female workers in a firm's labour force. However, we also find that the marginal productivity of female workers is...

We document the rise in unemployment in South Africa since the transition in 1994. We describe how changes in labour supply interacted with stagnant labour demand to produce unemployment rates that peaked between 2001 and 2003. Meanwhile, compositional changes in employment at the sectoral level...

A rough description of macroeconomic policy in South Africa would be that monetary policy concentrates on building nominal credibility through focusing on inflation, while the brunt of the responsibility for output stabilization rests on fiscal policy. This aricle discusses the convenience of...