This paper presents the first evidence on the efficacy of a major program designed to encourage the return migration of high-skilled individuals. The Malaysian Returning Expert Program targets high-skilled Malaysians abroad and provides them with tax incentives to return. At several eligibility...

Civil war in Syria has resulted in more than four million refugees fleeing the country, of which 1.8 million have found refuge in Turkey, making it the largest refugee-hosting country worldwide. This paper combines newly available data on the 2014 distribution of Syrian refugees across...

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...

This paper investigates the relationship of household income with child labor. The analysis uses a rich dataset obtained in the context of a conditional cash transfer program in a poor region of Nicaragua in 2005 and 2006. The program has a strong productive emphasis and seeks to diversify the...

It has been well established that the wages of individual workers react little, especially downwards, to shocks that hit their employer. This paper presents new evidence from a unique survey of firms across Europe on the prevalence of downward wage rigidity in both real and nominal terms. The...

The Gini coefficient of labor earnings in Brazil fell by nearly a fifth between 1995 and 2012, from 0.50 to 0.41. The decline in earnings inequality was even larger by other measures, with the 90-10 percentile ratio falling by almost 40 percent. Although the conventional explanation of a falling...

A vector autoregression model with time-varying coefficients is used to examine the evolution of wage cyclicality in four Latin American economies: Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, during the period 1980-2010. Wages are highly pro-cyclical in all countries up to the mid-1990s except in Chile....

Firms very rarely cut nominal wages, even in the face of considerable negative economic shocks. This paper uses a unique survey of fourteen European countries to ask firms directly about the incidence of wage cuts and to assess the relevance of a range of potential reasons for why the firms...