Working Paper
The Happy Farmer
Using survey data from rural Vietnam, this paper documents a statistically significant, positive effect of self-employment in farming on subjective well-being. Wage workers are less happy than farmers across a range of different types of wage jobs...
Working Paper
Trade Unions in an Emerging Economy
This paper provides a historical overview of the South African trade union movement, followed by a brief discussion of the labour market legislation and institutions formed since 1994. Thereafter, a detailed evaluation of the impact of trade unions...
Working Paper
Spillover Effects of International Standards
Most studies focus on trade effects and organizational outcomes of international standards, neglecting the effect of standards on employees. Using a two-year matched firm–employee panel dataset, this paper finds that the application of standards...
Working Paper
On the Effects of Formalization on Taxes and Wages
Based on a unique panel dataset consisting of both formal and informal firms surveyed every other year from 2005 to 2013, this paper explores the benefits of formalization to the government and firm employees in Vietnam. We find that formalization...
Working Paper
Education, Skill, and Earnings
This paper provides evidence on the nature of returns to education in Ghana and confirms the emerging empirical literature on the convexity of returns to education in Ghana. Using a basic Mincerian, model we find that returns to education more than...
Working Paper
Minimum Wage and Informality in Ecuador
This paper investigates if changes in the minimum wage have influenced changes on the formality and informality rates, and the level of wages in Ecuador. A 12-year panel was built. It allows to overcome the short time span of household data and so to...
Journal Article
On the Short- and Medium-Term Effects of Formalisation
This paper analyses the consequences of formalisation on the performance of informal firms, using a panel dataset from Vietnam. We find that switching firms (before switching) have higher profit and value added compared to non-switching firms...
Working Paper
Private Returns to Education for Wage-employees and the Self-employed in Uganda
The paper investigates the differences in private marginal returns to education between wage-employees and the self-employed in Uganda, using the Mincerian framework with pooled regression models. We use a two-wave household panel to estimate...
Working Paper
Impact of Education on Inequality Across the Wage Distribution Profile in Cameroon, 2005-10
This paper evaluates the impact of education on measured inequality across the wage distribution using pooled records from the 2005 and 2010 Cameroon labour force surveys, wage equations and standard inequality measures. Returns to education...
Working Paper
Liberalized trade policy and inequality
The phased elimination of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement has been one of the most compelling trade policy reforms of the early twenty-first century, and has brought in significant changes in the industrial structures of the countries of the global south...
Working Paper
Skills-Biased Labour Demand and the Pursuit of Inclusive Growth in South Africa
This paper examines the changing nature of occupational labour-market trends in South Africa and the resulting impact on wages. We observe high levels of demand for skilled labour that have intensified a trend already established before 1994. Over...
Journal Article
Structural Transformation, Biased Technological Change and Employment in Vietnam
Employment in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia has grown more slowly than GDP over the last several decades. This means GDP per capita is rising. Vietnamese policymakers, however, are concerned that ongoing structural transformation is creating too few...
Journal Article
The Happy Farmer
Using a unique survey data set this paper documents a positive effect of self-employment in farming on subjective well-being. This direct effect is only partly offset by negative, indirect effects working through income and other variables. These...
Working Paper
Computers and Labour Markets
The rapid diffusion of computers has widely changed the consequences of computer use on the labour market. While at the beginning of the eighties knowledge of computers was an obvious advantage in a career, this same knowledge is now so commonplace...
Working Paper
Does union membership pay off?
In the absence of adequate institutional mechanisms, trade unions can potentially promote higher wages and other worker benefits, yet limited data availability means little is known about the effect unions have on individual earnings in developing...
Working Paper
Wage Reform, Soft Budget Constraints and Competition
Since the beginning of the Chinese economic reforms in 1978, there has been a series of effort to reform the labour compensation practice in state- owned enterprises to strengthen the link between pay and productivity. Despite the reforms, however...
Working Paper
Spatial Inequality for Manufacturing Wages in Five African Countries
This paper uses data on individual earnings in manufacturing industry for five African countries in the early 1990s to test whether firms located in the capital city pay higher wages than firms located elsewhere, and whether such benefits accrue to...
Working Paper
The Determinants of Economic Performance in Transitional Economies
This paper reviews empirical evidence for key matters concerning new patterns of corporate governance and the determinants of economic performance in transitional economies. Many findings reported draw on new and unusual data for large samples of...
Working Paper
The evolution and determination of earnings inequality in post-apartheid South Africa
In this paper we identify some of the drivers of changes in the distribution of earnings and earnings inequality in the South African labour market between 2000 and 2014. Although the overall level of earnings inequality between 2000 and 2011 was...
Working Paper
Wage growth and inequality in urban China
We investigate the evolution of wage levels, wage inequality, and wage determinants among urban residents in China using China Household Income Project data from 1988, 1995, 2002, 2007, and 2013. Average wage grew impressively between each pair of...
Working Paper
Real and Relative Wage Rigidities
The overlapping wage contract model, known as the staggered contract model, is expanded in an open economy context to include wage indexation to add some more realism to the model. In addition the effects of alternative assumptions about availability...
Journal Article
Efficiency frontier and matching process on the labour market
The purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of the inefficient functioning of the Tunisian labour market. The study takes advantage of the recent development in the stochastic frontier techniques and estimates, the matching function for...
Book Chapter
Trade Unions in South Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.As an upper middle-income country within Africa, South Africa often attracts specific interest in terms of its economic growth and development dynamics. Often under-appreciated, is the...
Working Paper
China, South Africa, and the Lewis Model
The paper uses the Lewis model as a framework for examining the labour market progress of two labour-abundant countries, China and South Africa, towards labour shortage and generally rising labour real incomes. In the acuteness of their rural-urban...
Working Paper
The unintended long-run impacts of agro-terrorism in Brazil
This paper studies the unintended long-run effects of a permanent agricultural shock led by agro-terrorism in Brazil on the education and labour market. We explore the witches' broom outbreak in cocoa farms in the world's second most important cocoa...
Working Paper
Misinformed, mismatched, or misled?
Inaccurate expectations of future wages are found in many contexts. Yet, existing studies overwhelmingly refer to high-income countries, and there is little evidence regarding the sources of expectational errors.Based on a longitudinal survey of...
Working Paper
The impact of centralized bargaining on spillovers and the wage structure in monopsonistic labour markets
How does centralized bargaining affect the broader wage structure? And what does this tell us about the (non-)competitive dynamics of such labour markets? I study large contracted wage increases negotiated by centralized bargaining councils in South...
Working Paper
The effects of minimum wage hikes on employment and wages in Vietmam’s micro, small, and medium enterprises
Very little is known about the extent to which wage and employment offsetting behaviours change by firm size to mitigate the detrimental effects of minimum wage regulation. Do micro establishments react more aggressively to minimum wage shocks...