Openness to international competition can lead to enhanced resource allocation in the end. While factor reallocation is essential if net benefits are to be derived from trade liberalization, the process generates costs both for transitioning workers and for employers undergoing personnel...

This paper summarizes the main lessons learned from Law and Employment: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean, a forthcoming NBER book. It places Latin American economies and economic policies in a world context. The paper quantifies the cost of regulation in Latin America and OECD Europe...

This paper documents the high level of job security protection in Latin American labor markets and analyzes its impact on employment. We show that job security policies have substantial impact on the level and the distribution of employment in Latin America. They reduce employment and promote...

Economists have examined the impact of labor market regulations on the level of employment. However, there are many reasons to suspect that the impact of regulations differs across types of workers. In this paper we take advantage of the unusual large variance in labor policy in Chile to exa...

This paper investigates the relationship between part-time work and job satisfaction in Honduras. In contrast to previous work for developed countries, this paper does not find higher job satisfaction among women working part-time. Instead, for both women and men, job satisfaction is higher when...

What are the effects of television, and of role models portrayed in TV programs, on individual behavior? We focus on fertility choices in Brazil, a country where soap operas (novelas) portray families that are much smaller than in reality. We exploit differences in the timing of entry into...