This paper provides evidence on how the expansion of fast Internet along its current frontier in developing countries affects job creation. We exploit the gradual arrival in African coastal cities of submarine Internet cables from Europe and maps of the continent’s terrestrial cable network that connects those cities with users. Robust difference-in-differences estimates from four datasets cove...

We use the publicly-available Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) published by the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program of the U.S. Census Bureau to compute total employment by firm age.1 This dataset provides total employment2 in the private sector tabulated for 5 firm age categories—start-ups (0-1 year-olds), 2-3 year-olds, 4-5 year-olds, 6-10 year-olds, and firms over 11 ...

The focus of this conference on the supply side of the economy is fine, but we can get more mileage out of the discussion if we zoom in on the interaction between the supply side and the demand side. It was not a sudden deterioration in the supply side of the economy, such as a drastic reduction in the flexibility of the labor market, that triggered the rise in unemployment in the Organization ...

This paper presents a search and matching model to account for the most salient facts of labor markets with informal jobs in developing countries. The data suggests that workers reallocate from formal jobs into informal jobs in recessions, as well as when policy makers intervene in the market. This reallocation is mainly driven by the large and procyclical swings of the job …nding rate in the f...

Jeremy Greenwood1, Glenn M. MacDonald2, and Guang-Jia Zhang3 1 Department of Economics, University of Rochester, NY 14627-0156, USA 2 W.E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration and Department of Economics, University of Rochester, NY 14627-0156, USA 3 Department of Economics, University of Rochester, NY 14627-0156, USA, and Department of Economics, University of Guelph, Guelph NIG 2W...

The Arab Human Development Report Research Paper Series is a medium for sharing recent research commissioned to inform the Arab Human Development Report, and further research in the field of human development. The AHDR Research Paper Series is a quick-disseminating, informal publication whose titles could subsequently be revised for publication as articles in professional journals or chapters i...

As I've listened to the presentations and discussion at this conference over the past two days, I have been fascinated by the clear shift in the professional consensus on unemployment that has taken place during the past two decades. Twenty years ago, when I first started writing about how unemployment insurance and other labor market policies increase the rate of unemployment, l these were rad...