Despite internal conflict and the global financial crisis, Sri Lanka has made remarkable progress in the past decade, enjoying healthy economic growth and substantially reducing poverty. Moreover, Sri Lankans are the best-educated people in South Asia: the country has a 98 percent literacy rate,...

This paper uses a unique panel dataset of firms and workers to investigate the relationship between the firm’s lifecycle and the reallocation of labour. We distinguish labour reallocation associated with job reallocation, and reallocation of workers over a fixed configuration of jobs. We find...

The ‘fractal’ nature of the rise in earnings dispersion is one of its key features and remains a puzzle. This paper offers a new perspective on the causes of changes in earnings dispersion, focusing on the role of labour reallocation. Once we drop the assumption that all firms pay a given...