The U.S. labor share of income has been on a secular downward trajectory since thebeginning of the new millennium. Using data that are disaggregated across both state andindustry, we show the decline in the labor share is broad-based but the extent of the fallvaries greatly. Exploiting a new...

In recent years, unemployment rates in some ECCU countries have been among the highest globally. This paper evaluates several factors that could explain them, finding that high unit labor costs, in a context of strong unionization, are significantly associated with high structural unemployment,...

We show that a dynamic general equilibrium model with efficiency wages and endogenous capital accumulation in both the formal and (non-agricultural) informal sectors can explain the full range of confounding stylized facts associated with minimum wage laws in less developed countries

We estimate the elasticity of private-sector employment to non-oil GDP in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for GCC nationals and expatriates using a Seemingly Unrelated Error Correction (SUREC) model. Our results indicate that the employment response is lower for nationals, who have an...

Even though institutions are created to protect workers, they may interfere with labor market functioning, raise unemployment, and end up being circumvented by informal contracts. This paper uses Brazilian microeconomic data to show that the institutional changes introduced by the 1988...

Using panel data for 15 industrial countries, active labor market policies (ALMPs) are shown to have raised employment rates in the business sector in the 1990s, after controlling for many institutions, country-specific effects, and economic variables. Among such policies, direct subsidies to...

Using data from the Vietnam Labor Force Survey, this paper takes a granular look at the mostsalient drivers of labor informality in Vietnam by examining: (i) the nature of labor informalityand transitions from formal to informal employment status and the role of worker characteristics;(ii) the...

Does labor court uncertainty and judge subjectivity influence firms' performance? We study the economic consequences of judge decisions by collecting information on more than 145,000 Appeal court rulings, combined with administrative firm-level records covering the whole universe of French...