We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...

This paper combines district-level government spending data from Indonesia and natural disaster damage indices to analyze the extent to which districts are forced to reallocate their expenditures across categories after the incidence of floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. The results...

This article constitutes the first study of the employer size wage effect for a Caribbean country, namely the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Using a rich micro-level data set the authors estimate the firm size wage premium in an empirical model of wage determination. Despite exploring a...

Visible underemployment consists of workers who work less than the normal duration of working hours but are willing and available to work more. Compared to other groups of the labour force in Trinidad and Tobago the visibly underemployed tend to be less educated and are more likely to work in...

We model a competitive labour market where firms choose combinations of workers and hours per worker to produce output. If one assumes that the scale of production has no impact on hours per worker, then the change in the number of workers and hours per worker resulting from a minimum wage are...

We estimate the impact of hurricane strikes on local economic growth rates and how this is reflected in more aggregate growth patterns. To this end we assemble a panel data set of US coastal counties' growth rates and construct a hurricane destruction index that is based on a monetary loss...