The Forum's new publication Hedging Risk by Combating Human Trafficking: Insights from the Private Sector is designed to help companies share best practices so they can mitigate their risks and help eliminate this heinous practice. In this first of a series, we highlight insights and...

This report was prepared on the basis of the replies received from governments and organizations of employers and workers to the questionnaire and contains the substance of their observations, as well as those from other international organizations, together with the Office's commentary on the...

This is Part 1 of a two-part paper which surveys the historical evidence on the role of institutions in economic growth. The paper provides a critical scrutiny of a number of stylized facts widely accepted in the growth literature. It shows that private-order institutions have not historically...

This paper provides causal evidence on the long-term legacies of postwar reconstruction and mandatory employment on women's family formation outcomes such as marriage, age at first marriage and divorce. We exploit city-by-cohort variation in the intensity of World War II reconstruction in...

Did Russia's emancipated serfs really pay too much for too little land? : statistical anomalies and long-tailed distributions -- On good numbers and bad : Malthus, population trends, and peasant standard of living in late Imperial Russia -- Serfs in Imperial Russia demographic insights -- Serf...

"Informed by witness testimonies, Eurafrican Migration details how the perilous journeys undertaken by irregular migrants are enabled by complex networks of guides during the Sahara phase, and explores the relationship between migrants and the criminal groups who arrange for them to be...

Is free labour under capitalism a contradiction in terms? Two aspects of this long-debated question are considered. One is the divide between the libertarian insistence on individual freedom and the socialist contention of proletarian class unfreedom. Is there a viewpoint free of judgments or...

"While most contemporary historians agree that the use of debt peonage as a coercive labor contract in Mexico was not widespread, scholars still concur that it was important and pervasive in Yucatan state during the henequen boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The henequen boom...

"This book describes the growth and development of communal forced labor in Kenya from 1912-1930. During the early period in Kenya's colonial history the British administration employed various forms of forced labor to make Africans work on the building of infrastructure, like roads and bridges,...