Despite the perceived importance of labor market opportunities in shaping married women’s outside option, and their bargaining power within households as a result, this link has received very little empirical attention. Using longitudinal data on who makes the decision on a wide range of issues within Mexican households and data from the administrative records of the Mexican Social Security Ins...

Creating Low Skilled Jobs by Subsidizing Market-Contracted Household Work We analyze the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and several control variables f...

Skill shortages are often portrayed as a major problem for the economies of many countries including the Australian economy. Yet, there is surprisingly little evidence about their prevalence, causes and consequences. This paper attempts to improve our understanding about these issues by using econometric methods to analyse the Business Longitudinal Database, an Australian panel data-set with in...

The Impact of Degree Class on the First Destinations of Graduates: A Regression Discontinuity Approach This paper uses a regression-discontinuity design to identify the causal impact of degree class on the first destinations of UK graduates. We exploit the discontinuous relationship between degree class and the mean grade achieved by graduates in their last year at university, which is induced ...

The paper quantitatively evaluates the interaction between capital-skill complementarity and endogenous low-, medium-, and high-skilled labour supply in generating wage inequality, using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Auerbach-Kotliko¤ (1987) type. The counterfactual analysis conducted shows that the German skill premium de…ned by the 9 to 1 decile limit of earnings...

In spite of its predominant economic weight in developing countries, little is known about informal sector income dynamics vis-à-vis the formal sector. Some works have been done in this field using household surveys, but they only consider some emerging Latin American countries and a few African countries. As a matter of consequence, there is still no way to generalize the (diverging) results t...

Gender and Work Hours Transitions in Australia: Drop Ceilings and Trap-Door Floors We introduce the ideas of “drop ceilings”, that full-time employees who switch to reduced hours thereafter face an hours ceiling such that a return to full-time employment is difficult, and of “trap-door floors”, that full-time employees may be denied the opportunity to reduce their hours and instead face a choic...

“I Want to, But I Also Need to”: Start-Ups Resulting from Opportunity and Necessity When unemployed persons go into business, they often are characterized as necessity entrepreneurs, because push factors, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. In contrast to this, business founders who have been previously employed represent opportunity entrepreneurs because pull factors pro...

Returns for Entrepreneurs vs. Employees: The Effect of Education and Personal Control on the Relative Performance of Entrepreneurs vs. Wage Employees How valuable is education for entrepreneurs’ performance as compared to employees’? What might explain any differences? And does education affect peoples’ occupational choices accordingly? We answer these questions based on a large panel of US lab...

We analyze the effect of exposure to international trade on earnings and employment of U.S. workers from 1992 through 2007 by exploiting industry shocks to import competition stemming from China’s spectacular rise as a manufacturing exporter paired with longitudinal data on individual earnings by employer spanning close to two decades. Individuals who in 1991 worked in manufacturing industries ...