This paper analyzes the cyclical properties of worker flows in Brazil and Mexico, two important developing countries with large unregulated or "informal" sectors. It generates three stylized facts that are critical to the accurate modeling of the sector and which suggest the need to rethink the...

This paper discusses a set of statistics for examining and comparing labor market dynamics based on the estimation of continuous time Markov transition processes. It then uses these to establish stylized facts about dynamic patterns of movement using panel data from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico....

This paper studies gross worker flows to explain the rising informality in Brazilian metropolitan labor markets from 1983 to 2002. This period covers two economic cycles, several stabilization plans, a far-reaching trade liberalization, and changes in labor legislation through the Constitutional...

The authors study the dynamics of three developing country labor markets using recent advances in the estimation of continuous time Markov processes. They first examine the flows of workers among five states: three types of paid labor, unemployment, and out of the labor force. The authors find a...

This paper studies gross worker flows to explain the rise in informality in Brazilian metropolitan labor markets from 1983 to 2002. In particular, we examine the impact of trade and constitutional reforms (that include increased firing costs, tighter restrictions on overtime work, and fewer...

Using data from Mexico, the authors study empirically the link between trade policy and individual income risk and the extent to which this varies across workers of different human capital (education) levels. They use longitudinal income data on workers to estimate time-varying individual income...

Using subnational historical data, this paper establishes the within country persistence of economic activity in the New World over the last half millennium. The paper constructs a data set incorporating measures of pre-colonial population density, new measures of present regional per capita...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data, and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...

Using detailed survey data on management practices, this paper uses recent advances in unconditional quantile analysis to study the changes in the within country distribution of management quality associated with country convergence to the managerial frontier. It then decomposes the contribution...

The paper argues that there is a greater commonality of approach between the National Innovation Systems approach and mainstream economic analysis than is often asserted, and that a better dialogue between the two could strengthen both perspectives. To this end, the paper uses an off-the-shelf...