This paper provides an extensive review of the literatures on product and labor market regulations and their effects on labor market outcomes. It uncovers the interdependence of these two types of regulations, an area that has received limited attention in research. The paper highlights why...

Formal sector entry-level jobs in Mexico offer low starting salaries but substantial wage growth. This paper experimentally tests whether a six-months wage incentive can increase formal employment among secondary school graduates. Combining survey and high-frequency social security data, the...

In low-income communities in both rich and poor countries, redistributive transfers within kin and social networks are frequent. Such arrangements may distort labor supply—acting as a "social tax" that dampens the incentive to work. We document that across countries, from Cote d'Ivoire to the...

Governments around the developing world face pressure to intervene actively to help jobseekers find employment. Two of the most common policies used are job training, based on the idea that many of those seeking jobs lack the skills employers want, and job search assistance, based on the...

As of 2019, more than 1.2 million Venezuelans have passed through Ecuador and over 400,000 settled in, which amounts to almost 3% of Ecuador's population. This paper analyzes the location choices of Venezuelan migrants within Ecuador and the labor market consequences of these choices, using data...

Ecuador has become the third largest receiver of the 4.3 million Venezuelans that left their country in the last five years, hosting around 10% of them. Little is known about the characteristics of these migrants and their labor market outcomes. This paper fills this gap, analyzing a new large...

We present field experimental evidence that limited information about workseekers' skills distorts both firm and workseeker behavior. Assessing workseekers' skills, giving workseekers their assessment results, and helping them to credibly share the results with firms increases workseekers'...

Better understanding the geography of women's labor market outcomes within countries is important to inform targeted efforts to increase women's economic empowerment. This paper assesses the extent to which a method that combines simulated survey data from urban areas in Mexico with broadly...

Households' and firms' subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households' and firms' economic...

We use high frequency phone survey data from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda to analyze the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on work (including wage employment, self-employment, and farm work) and income, as well as heterogeneity by gender, family composition, education, age, pre-COVID-19...