Many low- and middle-income countries have introduced Public Works Programmes (PWPs) to fight poverty. PWPs provide temporary cash-for-work opportunities to boost poor households' incomes and to provide better infrastructure to local communities. While PWPs do not target children directly, the...

In view of the demographic trends, most EU countries face the problem of a declining work force in the future. Understanding the interaction between income support systems (such as unemployment benefits, social assistance, early retirement and pension systems) and total labor supply is of...

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the potential of social protection programs in mitigating labor market shocks. We examine the role of one of the world's largest employment guarantee schemes, India's MG-NREGA, in cushioning job losses in one of the worst affected economies due to the...

This study estimates effects of minimum wages on individual restaurant employment using the 2005-2019 Current Population Survey (CPS) and a two-way fixed effects regression model. I examine effects for teens and adults with less than an associate's degree for the entire U.S. and by metropolitan...

Since the 1980s, income inequality in New Zealand has been a growing concern - particularly in metropolitan areas. At the same time, the encouragement of permanent and temporary immigration has led to the foreign-born accounting for a growing share of the population; this is disproportionally so...

In this paper, we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate how well China's urban areas absorb migrant workers under the interaction of urbanization and industrialization. We applied an output-oriented BCC model to evaluate provincial and regional rural labor absorption efficiency in...

It has been well documented that employment outcomes often differ considerably across areas. This paper examines the extent to which the local human capital level, measured as the share of prime age adults with a college degree, has positive external effects on labor force participation and...

Firms are more productive on average in larger cities. Two main explanations have been offered: firm selection (larger cities toughen competition, allowing only the most productive to survive) and agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity), possibly...

Economic regions, such as urban agglomerations, face external demand and price shocks that produce income risk. Workers in large and diversified agglomerations may benefit from reduced wage volatility, while firms may outsource the production of intermediate goods and realize benefits from...

In this paper, I study the impact of immigrant concentration in primary schools on educational outcomes of native and migrant students in a major Austrian city between 1980-2001. The outcome measures of interest are track attendance after primary education and grade repetition. Using variation...