We study the causal impact of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes, household consumption, inequality and poverty in Thailand by relying on policy variation in minimum wages over time across provinces. We find that minimum-wage increases have a large and significant impact on the likelihood of working in the uncovered sector among workers with elementary education. However, the impact is very small and insignificant among other labor market groups. In contrast, the minimum wage has large positive effects on the formal sector wages of low-earning workers, such as the young, elderly and low educated. Increases in the minimum wage are associated with reductions in household poverty and consumption inequality at the bottom half of the distribution.

We analyze how labor flows respond to idiosyncratic shifts in firm-level production functions and demand curves using very detailed Swedish micro data. Shocks to firms' physical productivity have only modest effects on firm-level employment decisions. In contrast, we document rapid and substantial employment adjustments through both hires and separations in response to firm-level demand shocks. The choice of adjustment margin depends on the sign of the shock: Firms adjust through increased hires if these shocks are positive and through increased separations if the shocks are negative.

The Gini coefficient of labor earnings in Brazil fell by nearly a fifth between 1995 and 2012, from 0.50 to 0.41. The decline in earnings inequality was even larger by other measures, with the 90-10 percentile ratio falling by almost 40 percent. Although the conventional explanation of a falling education premium did play a role, an RIF regression-based decomposition analysis suggests that the decline in returns to potential experience was the main factor behind lower wage disparities during the period. Substantial reductions in the gender, race, informality and urban-rural wage gaps, conditional on human capital and institutional variables, also contributed to the decline. Although rising minimum wages were equalizing during 2003-2012, they had the opposite effects during 1995-2003, because of declining compliance. Over the entire period, the direct effect of minimum wages on inequality was muted.

A rapid expansion in the demand for post-secondary education triggered an unprecedented boom of higher education programs in Colombia, possibly deteriorating quality. This paper uses rich administrative data matching school admission information, socio-economic characteristics of the young graduates, standardized test scores pre- and post-tertiary education and entry wages, to assess the heterogeneity in the value added generated by new higher education programs. Our findings show that once we account for self-selection the penalty of attending a recently created program, which initially appeared to be quite large, becomes close to zero.

We present new empirical evidence on the implications of minimum wages for the uncovered sector in developing countries, analyzing a unique dataset assembled from a set of micro surveys collected in 59 low and middle income countries. Our identification strategy exploits relative bindingness in minimum wages across labor market groups within countries and years. The empirical findings show that a higher minimum wage is associated with a larger self-employment share. The effect is approximately linear in the relative level of the minimum wage, even if higher levels of minimum wages are associated with higher levels of non-compliance. The estimated impact of the minimum wage on informality is economically significant: a 1 percentage point increase in the minimum wage ratio is associated with a 0.204 percentage points increase in the self-employment rate.

The objective of the paper is to document whether employment and wage polarization occurs in Latin American countries. We measure the routine/abstract/manual content of jobs in Latin American countries exploiting a novel survey conducted in Bolivia, Colombia and El Salvador (STEP, Skills Towards Employment and Productivity). Comparing task intensity scores in those countries and the U.S. shows that while the abstract content of jobs is similar in North- and South-America, the routine and manual contents are different. We speculate that the reason may be that Latin American occupations comprise a more heterogeneous set of tasks. Merging occupation-specific information on the task intensity with individual-level data available for Mexico and Chile, we show that employment polarization seems to take place in Chile but not in Mexico during the 2000s. No evidence of wage polarization shows up. Descriptive evidence from cross-sectional individual data on the returns to skills in Mexico and Chile suggests that abstract and manual tasks have positive returns, the latter being more pronounced for older workers, while returns to routine tasks are negative.

The identification of the causal impact of parental education on children’s school performance is affected by the endogeneity of parental education, as well as the possibility of sample selection due to children dropping out of school. We address both these issues using partial identification methods that bound the causal effect of interest in observational data under relatively mild assumptions. We apply our methods to identify the causal impact of mothers’ education on children’s PISA test scores in Argentina. We find that higher levels of maternal education substantially increase children’s test scores in the middle quantiles of the score distribution.