This paper uses a large national household panel from 1999/2000 and 2007/08 to analyze the short-term effects of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme on wages, labor supply, agricultural labor use, and productivity. The scheme prompted a 10-point wage increase and...

This paper uses municipal-level data from South Africa for the period 1996-2011 to estimate the medium to long-run effects of trade liberalization on local labor markets. It finds that local labor markets that were more exposed to tariff cuts tended to experience slower growth in employment and...

This paper examines how the 2008-09 financial crisis affected labor markets in Central and Western Europe, and how this impact depended on employment protections laws. Using a differences-in-differences approach that compares industries with varying degrees of inherent dependence on external...

This paper assesses some of the main strands of the theoretical literature on unemployment and employment and shows that their interesting conclusions may not be transferable to low-income countries whose endowment and production structures are profoundly different from that of high-income...

This paper investigates the relationship between sectoral growth patterns and employment outcomes. A broad cross-country analysis reveals that in middle-income countries, employment responds more to growth in less productive and more labor-intensive sectors. Employment in middle-income countries...

Using data on Israeli closures inside the West Bank, this paper provides new evidence on the labor market effects of conflict-induced restrictions to mobility. To identify the effects, the analysis exploits the fact that the placement of physical barriers by Israel was exogenous to local labor...

This paper examines the evolution of the gender employment gap post COVID-19 in the Egyptian manufacturing sector, using a unique firm-level data set. The findings show that the COVID-19 shock led to a slight improvement in the gender employment gap, both in absolute and relative terms, driven...

Despite sustained output growth since 1997, low-income Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries (CIS-7) have not experienced growth in employment, a phenomenon observed elsewhere in transitional economies and labeled as "jobless growth." The author addresses the causes of this...

Foreign firms often have a more educated workforce and pay higher wages than domestic firms. This does not necessarily imply that foreign ownership translates into higher demand for educated workers or higher wages, since foreign investment may be guided by unobservable firm characteristics...

This paper provides evidence on the labor productivity growth and employment impacts of foreign direct investment in selected countries in Africa over the years 2001-2012. It uses data from five emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and advanced countries (Canada,...