Can digital information and communication technology (ICT) foster mass political mobilization? We use a novel geo-referenced dataset for the entire African continent between 1998 and 2012 on the coverage of mobile phone signal together with geo-referenced data from multiple sources on the...

The paper begins with a discussion of Indian labour law and the increasing use of "contract labour" in Indian formal manufacturing. We question the widespread perception that employment of contract labour provides flexibility to employers in terms of adjustment in response to demand and...

Faced with easier access to foreign technology and imported capital goods, firms in India's organised manufacturing sector adopted advanced techniques of production leading to increasing automation and a rise in the capital intensity of production. This has raised much concern about the ability...

This paper studies firms' decisions to export and invest in R&D and their effects on employment growth and labor flows for a sample of Italian SMEs operating in the manufacturing industry. After accounting for the under-reporting of R&D in SMEs, our quantile regressions reveal that (i) R&D is...

Indian manufacturers have invested significantly in technology upgradations since the economy opened up to foreign trade and technology in the mid-1980s. In this paper, we examine the impact of technology on employment and skill demand within the Indian manufacturing sector. Estimating a dynamic...

The factors responsible for the lacklustre performance India's manufacturing are well identified in contemporary literature. The important ones are absence of world class infrastructure, complex system of internal taxation, an unpredictable taxation environment, and regulations relating to land...

One particularly significant piece of labour legislation in India is the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 (CLA,1970), which regulates labour hired by firms through the offices of a labour contractor - such labour being referred to as 'contract' labour in India. This paper...