This paper analyzes data from a novel field experiment designed to test the impact of twodifferent insurance products and a secret saving device on solidarity in risk-sharing groupsamong rural villagers in the Philippines. Risk is simulated by a lottery. Risk-sharing ispossible in solidarity...

Skill shortages are often portrayed as a major problem for the economies of many countriesincluding the Australian economy. Yet, there is surprisingly little evidence about theirprevalence, causes and consequences. This paper attempts to improve our understandingabout these issues by using...

The potentially adverse labor market effects of severance pay mandates are a continuingsource of policy concern. In a seminal study, Lazear (1990) found that contract avoidance ofseverance pay firing costs was theoretically simple – a bonding scheme would do – but thatempirically the labor...

The fact that members of an immigrant community may have different demographiccharacteristics, or may have different tastes, to the indigenous population, may manifestitself in differences in saving behaviour. In addition, depending on their ethnicbackground, there could be differences among the...

Research on informal employment in transition countries has been very limited because of alack of appropriate data. A new rich panel data set from Ukraine, the Ukrainian LongitudinalMonitoring Survey (ULMS), enables us to provide some empirical evidence on informalemployment in Ukraine and the...

It is argued that migration from Mexico to the US and its corresponding return migration aredetermined by international wage differentials and preferences for origin. We use a model ofjob search, savings and migration to show that job turnover is a crucial determinant of themigration process...

Labor markets in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe underwent adramatic transformation. Notably, this transformation took place within just a few years. Untilthe mid-2000s job opportunities were scarce and unemployment was high. But since thenlabor demand has picked up and...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy from 1760 to1913 and shows that it passed through a two stage evolution of inequality. In the first half ofthe nineteenth century, the real wage stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profitrate doubled and the...

State led credit and savings programs have been implemented in nu-merous low income countries, but their success in reaching the poorremains widely debated. We report on research which exploits the pol-icy features of the Indian social banking program to provide evidenceon this issue. State-led...

A switch from a Bismarckian (BIS) earnings-related to a Beveridgean (BEV) flat ratepay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension scheme will raise the variance of personal replacementratios and, hence, the variance of individual interest-saving elasticities. A monopolisticfinancial sector can then make greater...