Big Push models suggest that local product demand can create multiple labor market equilibria: one featuring high wages, formalization, and high demand and one with low wages, informality, and low demand. I demonstrate that minimum wages may coordinate development at the high wage equilibrium....

South Africa has very high unemployment, yet few adults work informally in small firms. This paper tests whether centralized bargaining, by which unionized large firms extend arbitration agreements to nonunionized smaller firms, contributes to this problem. While local labor market...

This paper examines the importance of network-based intergenerational correlations in South Africa. I use longitudinal data on young South Africans to examine the covariance of children's employment with the usefulness of parents in their job search. I find that fathers serve as useful network...

We use recruitment into a laboratory experiment in Kolkata, India to analyze how social networks select individuals for jobs. The experiment allows subjects to refer actual network members for casual jobs as experimental subjects under exogenously varied incentive contracts. We provide evidence...

Many micro-enterprises in Kenya have low productivity. We focus on one particular business decision which may indicate low productivity: keeping enough change on hand to break larger bills. This is a surprisingly large problem. Our estimates suggest that the average firm loses approximately...

Attrition bias is a problem for users of panel data. Researchers need to know what socio-economic factors are associated with attrition, and whether this is of relevance for the kind of analysis they want to conduct. This paper discusses attrition bias in the 2000/2004 Khayelitsha panel study....