This paper analyses the impact of government grants on labour demand using plant level data for manufacturing industry in Ireland. Our data consists of a large sample of plants and their complete grant history. We provide evidence that additional employment is created over and above the level...

We estimate the wage penalty associated with working in the South African informal sector. To this end we use a rich data set on non-self employed males that allows one to accurately distinguish workers employed in the informal sector from those employed in the formal sector and link individuals...

We develop a model where workers may enter self-employment or search for jobs as employees and where there is heterogeneity across workers’ managerial ability. Workers with higher skills will manage larger firms while workers with low managerial ability will run smaller firms and will be in...

While foreign-owned firms have consistently been found to pay higher wages than domestic firms to what appear to be equally productive workers, the causes of this remain unresolved. In a two-period bargaining framework we show that if training is more productive and specific in foreign firms,...

We estimate the impact of internal migration on local labour markets in Thailand.Using an instrumental variable approach based on weather and distance we estimate an exogenous measure of the net migration in ow into each region. Our results show that instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of...

Using micro data from the Quarterly National Household Survey we look at trends in Irish union membership from 2001-2006. There was a steep decline in union density. Decomposition analysis suggests that most of the decline is associated with a decline in the underlying probability of becoming a...

We show in a monopsony model that a minimum wage may raise hours which are already too high but has ambiguous effects on the number of employees and utility. Employment subsidies, in contrast, unambiguously improve worker utility and bring the market equilibrium closer to the efficient outcome.

Using a standard production function the equilibrium hours per worker wage locus is shown to be u-shaped in a competitive labour market. A minimum wage mayth us either increase or decrease hours per worker and, by extension, the number of workers. We provide supporting evidence for this using...

We show in a theoretical efficiency wage model where firms differ in monitoring intensity or in the effort intensity of their technologies that the impact of monitoring intensity on wages is ambiguous, a result that mirrors evidence from the empirical literature. We argue that to correctly...