Public works programs, aimed at building a strong social safety net through redistribution of wealth and generation of meaningful employment, are becoming increasingly popular in developing countries. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), enacted in August 2005, is one such program in India. This paper assesses causal impacts (Intentto-Treat) of NREGA on public works participatio...

Over 11 million undocumented persons reside in the United States. This paper examines the labor supply of this population. Using newly developed methods that impute undocumented status for persons in the Current Population Surveys, the study documents a number of findings. The labor force participation rate of undocumented men is larger than that of natives or legal immigrants; this gap widened...

Fertility behavior is constrained by the labor force status of both partners of a couple (married or cohabiting), and by how they distribute among them household chores, childcare, and paid work. Uncertainty about labor market prospects and associated income is also likely to influence fertility decisions. Moreover, institutional configurations specific to each country may influence the decisio...

This paper relates physical and mental health status to labor force participation and compares these relationships among self-report and proxy respondents. Previous research has conjectured that self-reports of health status may lead to an upward bias in the estimated effect of health on labor productivity because subjects who are out of the labor force may be more likely to understate their he...

The aim of this paper is to understand recent observations of fertility, female employment, and participation rates in O.E.C.D. countries. These observations indicate that fertility rates are positively correlated with female employment ratios and participation rates across O.E.C.D. countries during the period 1985-1996. Moreover, the time series observations show that fertility rates are procy...

This paper analyses a model of overlapping generations in which agents who do not participate in the labor market are unable to borrow. Thus an increase in a fully funded pension raises aggregate savings even with a fixed participation rate since private savings are not crowded out one-for-one. When labor force participation is determined endogenously, a rise in the level of fully funded pensio...

Each generation of digital innovation has caused a dramatic change in the way people work. Sharing economy is the latest trend of digital innovation, and it has fundamentally changed the traditional business models. In this paper, we empirically examine the impacts of the sharing economy platforms (specifically, Uber) on the labor market in terms of labor force participation, unemployment rate,...

The authors use data from the Health and Retirement Study's Earnings Benefit File, which links Health and Retirement Study to Social Security Administration records, to estimate the impact of childhood health on earnings curves between the ages of 25 and 50 years. They also investigate the extent to which diminished educational attainment, earlier onset of chronic health conditions, and labor f...

The purpose of this study is to examine alternative pathways to labor force exit among older men. Based on the life course perspective, we distinguish between crisp exits from the labor force, which are characterized as being unidirectional, and blurred transition patterns, which include repeated exists, entrances, and unemployment spells. Using longitudinal data from the 1984 Survey of Income ...

We used the first wave of the Health and Retirement Survey to study the effect of health on the labor force activity of black and white men and women in their 50s. The evidence we present confirms the notion that health is an extremely important determinant of early labor force exit. Our estimates suggest that health differences between blacks and whites can account for most of the racial gap i...