Gold, Labor, and Commodities as Standards of Value

Trade AND Labor Standards

Labor Standards, Development, and CAFTA

Kimberly Ann Elliott is a research fellow at the Institute for International Economics and has a joint appointment with the Center for Global Development. She served on the National Academies Committee on Monitoring International Labor Standards in 2002–03 and, in 1999, as chair of the Task Force on Civil Society of the State Department Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy. Her p...

Environmental Standards and Labor Productivity

In the last decade, a rising number of firms have adopted international environmental management and product standards such as the international ISO 14001 management standard or organic certification. While emerging research analyzes the impact of these practices on environmental performance or financial performance, there is, to our knowledge no empirical research on the effect of these standa...

Labor Standards , Labor Endowments and the Evolution of Inequality

away from short-term dynamics of the business cycle that might impact inequality. Second, the inequality data are available for only a limited number of years for many countries and there are often substantial gaps in the time-series. A truly dynamic statistical model is, therefore, beyond the available data. Initially, we estimate simple cross-sectional regressions of the sort outlined in (Bec...

Effects of Labor Standards on Labor Costs and FDI Flows

This chapter summarizes the main findings of a recent study applying new country-level measures of labor standards – constructed from coding textual information and emphasizing actual worker rights – in a statistical analysis of labor costs and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in the 1990s. Labor standards addressed are in regard to freedom of association and collective bargaining, child...