This paper uses a search-and-matching model to examine the effects of labor regulations that influence the cost of formal labor (notably minimum wages and payroll taxes) on labor market outcomes in Morocco. The model assumes that the informal sector is unregulated and thus not directly affected...

Concerns about incentives and targeting naturally arise when cash transfers are used to fight poverty. The authors address these concerns in the context of China's Di Bao program, which uses means-tested transfers to try to assure that no registered urban resident has an income below a...

Minimum wages are generally thought to be unenforceable in developing rural economies. But there is one solution - a workfare scheme in which the government acts as the employer of last resort. Is this a cost-effective policy against poverty? Using a microeconometric model of the casual labor...

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

This paper relies on a simple framework to understand the gender wage gap in Macedonia, and simulates how the gender wage gap would behave after the introduction of a minimum wage. First, it presents a new - albeit simple - decomposition of the wage gap into three factors: (i) a wage level...

This paper offers evidence on the relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment and informal employment, and identifies some of the lessons learned on the potential effects of increasing the minimum wage. Most of the evidence suggests that sizable increases in the minimum wage are...

The authors use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to gross domestic product shocks in destination countries. They find a large significant elasticity of migrant numbers to gross domestic product shocks...

Labor market regulation is a high-profile, and often contentious, area of public policy. Although these regulations have been studied most extensively in developed countries, there is a growing body of literature on their effects in developing countries. This paper reviews that literature and...

Using manufacturing plant-level census data, this paper demonstrates that minimum wage increases in Indonesia reduced gender wage gaps among production workers, with heterogeneous impacts by level of education and position of the firm in the wage distribution. Paradoxically, educated women...