Labor Market Institutions and Informality in Transition and Latin American Countries This paper analyzes, using country-level panel data from transition economies and Latin America, the impact of labor market institutions on informal economic activity. The measure of informal economic activity is taken from Schneider et al. (2010), the most comprehensive study to date. The data on institutions,...

Push or Pull? Drivers of Female Labor Force Participation during India’s Economic Boom In the past twenty years, India’s economy has grown at increasing rates and now belongs to the fastest-growing economies in the world. This paper examines drivers of female labor force participation in urban India between 1987 and 2004, showing a much more nuanced picture of female labor force participation t...

We exploit cross-city variation in manufacturing decline and housing market changes during the 2000s, and jointly estimate their effects on non-employment. Both forces strongly affected nonemployment between 2000 and 2007, with the increase from manufacturing decline almost exactly offset by reductions attributable to housing. We show that this offsetting occurred both in the aggregate and at t...

Patterns of Integration: Low Educated People and their Jobs in Norway, Italy and Hungary The paper looks at how the distribution of jobs by complexity and firms’ willingness to hire low educated labor for jobs of different complexity contribute to unskilled employment in Norway, Italy and Hungary. In search of how unqualified workers can attend complex jobs, it compares their involvement in var...

The U.S. temporary work program (TWP) for lower skilled jobs, the American nonimmigrant H-2 visa, has been admitting foreign workers for agricultural jobs for the past half century. While US policy is widely seen as having failed to control illegal entry, employer use of the H-2A program has, nevertheless, substantially increased over the past fifteen years. I describe the growth of the H-2A wo...

This study assesses the effects of industrial disputes legislation and the dispute settlement process on informal versus formal employment in India. It uses indicators of pro-worker court awards and court efficiency as well as amendments to the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) at the level of Indian states. The state-level IDA amendments are classified as pro-worker or proemployer and enforcement ...

Many studies have shown that small firms generate more patents per R&D dollar than large firms. Does this mean that small firms are more efficient innovators than large firms? In this paper we exploit a unique data set to reexamine the firm size-innovation relationship. Because firm-reported R&D expenditures may be a biased measure of R&D activities due to underreporting by small firms, we use ...

Territorial Differences in Italian Students’ Mathematical Competencies: Evidence from PISA 2003 In this paper we investigate the existence and the size of territorial differences in Italian students’ mathematical competencies. Our analysis benefits from a new data set that merges the 2003 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with territorial data collected from...

Using data for German and Swedish multinational enterprises (MNEs), this paper assesses international employment patterns. It analyzes determinants of location choice and the degree of substitutability of labor across locations. Countries with highly skilled labor forces attract German MNEs, but we find no such evidence for Swedish MNEs. This is consistent with the hypothesis that German MNEs l...

It is of great importance for the management environment to acknowledge and understand networking practices and diversity issues. To ensure effective teamwork and a stable working environment networking needs to be enhanced and supported. To understand networking in a culturally diverse environment the networking practices were investigated at a Gauteng mine. Data was collected from Kusasalethu...