We report the results of a field experiment that randomly placed unemployed young people as apprentices with small firms in Ghana, and included no cash subsidy to firms (or workers) beyond in-kind recruitment services.
Informal actors often compete with formal or regulated ones. Regulated actors therefore can be natural allies in government attempts to enforce laws and regulations. Yet they often are not.
This paper reports on the universe of garment-making firm owners in a Ghanaian district capital during the COVID-19 crisis. By July 2020, 80% of both male- and female-owned firms were operational.
Increases in the minimum wage can substantially reduce earnings inequality. To demonstrate this, we combine administrative and survey data with an equilibrium model of the Brazilian labor market.
Many firms in developing countries could be too small to adopt modern technology embodied in expensive production machines. This paper shows that rental market interactions allow these small firms to increase their effective scale and mechanize production.
Tracing out the effect of large economic stimuli on the pattern of transactions in an integrated economy, and their aggregate implications, has long been a central goal of economic analysis, but until now has not been studied experimentally.
We assess South African workseekers' skills and disseminate the assessment results to explore how limited information affects firm and workseeker behavior.
