03. Journals

1,598 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2210
These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.

Sub-collections of this Collection
Country: Mexico × Country: Brazil × Subject: Economic Development: Human Resources ×

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    Changes in Returns to Education in Latin America : The Role of Demand and Supply of Skills
    ( 2010) Manacorda, Marco ; Sanchez-Paramo, Carolina ; Schady, Norbert
    Using micro data for the urban areas of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, the authors document trends in men's returns to education during the 1980s and the 1990s and estimate the role of supply and demand factors in explaining the changes in skill premia. They propose a model of demand for skills with three production inputs, corresponding to workers with primary-, secondary-, and university-level education. Further, the authors demonstrate that an unprecedented rise in the supply of workers having completed secondary-level education depressed their wages relative to workers with primary-level education throughout Latin America. This supply shift was compounded by a generalized shift in the demand for workers with tertiary education.
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    Informal Self-Employment and Macroeconomic Fluctuations
    ( 2010) Fiess, Norbert M. ; Fugazza, Marco ; Maloney, William F.
    Informal self-employment is a major source of employment in developing countries. Its cyclical behavior is important to our understanding of the functioning of LDC labor markets, but turns out to be surprisingly complex. We develop a flexible model with two sectors: a formal salaried (tradable) sector that may be affected by wage rigidities, and an informal (non tradable) self-employment sector faced with liquidity constraints to entry. This labor market is then embedded in a standard small economy macro model. We show that different types of shocks interact with different institutional contexts to produce distinct patterns of comovement between key variables of the model: relative salaried/self-employed incomes, relative salaried/self-employed sector sizes and the real exchange rate. Model predictions are then tested empirically for Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. We confirm episodes where the expansion of informal self-employment is consistent with the traditional segmentation views of informality. However, we also identify episodes where informal self-employment behaves "pro-cyclically"; here, informality is driven by relative demand or productivity shocks to the non tradable sector.