In this paper we assess the relationship between labor policies and market outcomes in Bolivia, accounting for a large informal sector mostly comprised of self-employed entrepreneurs. We calibrate a job search and matching model to reproduce labor market features in 2013, a period in which...

The alarming number of children engaged in labor as released by the National Statistics Office from the years 1995 to 2001 gave rise to a timely national policy study to review all the important studies available on child labor and assess key government policies affecting child labor in the...

The low level and adverse trends of youth employment in Africa and in the Middle East in the last decade are key driving factors of poverty, stress migration, frustration and political instability. There needs to be a sense of urgency to change the situation. How can employment, especially for...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruptions to education, with school closures affecting over one billion children. These closures, aimed at reducing virus transmission, resulted in significant learning losses, particularly in mathematics and science. Using data from TIMSS 2023, which...

We assess the impact of discrimination on Black individuals' job networks across the U.S. using a two-stage field experiment with 400+ fictitious LinkedIn profiles. In the first stage, we vary race via AI-generated images only and find that Black profiles' connection requests are 13 percent less...

This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state....

Upon arrival to a new country, many immigrants face job downgrading, a phenomenon describing workers being in jobs far below where they would be assigned based on their skills. Downgrading leads to immigrants receiving lower returns to the same skills than natives. The level of downgrading could...

Despite its stability over time, as for any statistical relationship, Okun's law is subject to deviations that can be large at times. In this paper, we provide a mapping between residuals in Okun's regressions and structural shocks identified using a SVAR model by inspecting how unemployment...

Understanding the selection of workers into informality is a policy priority to design programs to increase formalization across Sub-Saharan Africa, where nine out of ten workers are informal. This paper estimates a model of self-selection with entry barriers into the formal sector to identify...

Despite the steady increase in the number of women who join the labor force, there are still substantial cross-country variations in both women's labor force participation and gender-linked occupational inequality. Utilizing micro-data from 47 countries (circa 2013) obtained from the Luxembourg...