Green growth policies confront firms and workers with adjustments that may create welfare costs for different segments of the population and cause reductions in near-term actual versus potential gross domestic product. There is little evidence on the cost of adjustment to climate change...

The scope and complexity of international trading arrangements in the Middle East, as well as their spotty historical record of success, underscores the urgent need for an adequate understanding of the relative costs and benefits of participation in preferential trading arrangements and, more...

This paper estimates the mobility costs of workers across sectors and regions in a large sample of developing countries. The paper develops a new methodology that uses cross-sectional data only. This is motivated by the fact that panel data typically are not available for most developing...

Informal employment is ubiquitous in developing countries, but few studies have estimated workers'switching costs between informal and formal employment. This paper builds on the empirical literature grounded in discrete choice models to estimate these costs. The results suggest that...

This paper analyzes the important, yet often ignored, link between capital adjustment and the choice of fuels used by manufacturing firms. A novel econometric framework, which explicitly incorporates heterogeneous fuel-using capital stocks in the estimation of optimal fuel choice, is applied to...

The authors use a panel of manufacturing firms to analyze the adjustment process in capital blue collar and white collar employment in Uruguay during a period of trade liberalization when average tariff protection fell from 43 to 14 percent. They calculate the desired factor levels arising from...

Creating productive jobs is one of the greatest challenges in Ghana. This paper looks at job creation and its relationship with firm productivity and the quality of jobs among registered firms in the Ghanaian private sector, based on the 2013 World Bank Enterprise Survey. The study looks at the...

In low- and middle-income countries, scaling essential health interventions to achieve health development targets is constrained by the lack of skilled health professionals to deliver services. This paper takes a labor market approach to project future health workforce demand based on an...

This paper investigates differences in the composition of employment between exporting and non-exporting firms. In particular, it asks whether exporting firms hire more engineers relative to blue-collar workers than non-exporting firms. In a stylized partial-equilibrium model, firms produce...

Inadequacies in Tanzania's education and training systems compromise the quality of workforce skills, giving rise to skill shortages, and constraining the operations and growth of formal sector firms in the country. This study addressed these concerns using data from a unique Enterprise Skills...