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The rise in unemployment during an economic crisis poses a significant concern to policy makers. This paper measures the effect of a program in Mexico that granted firms in certain industries wage subsidies if they decided to keep their workers instead of letting them go during the recent economic crisis. The analysis uses monthly administrative data on employment at the industry level, along with propensity score matching to construct groups of eligible and ineligible durable goods manufacturing industries that display statistically identical pre-program trends in employment. Difference-in-difference results show a positive but not statistically significant effect of the wage subsidies on employment during the program's eight-month duration, ranging from 5.7 to 13.2 percent in magnitude, depending on the specification. The size of the effect increases to 24 percent after the program ended and the results indicate that employment after the program recovered faster in eligible industries than in ineligible industries.

Child Labor Law. --- Child Labor. --- Crisis Mitigation. --- Firm Behavior. --- Industrial Policy. --- Labor and Employment Law. --- Labor Law. --- Labor Markets. --- Law and Development. --- Social Protections and Labor. --- Wage Subsidies.

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Can repatriation inflows impact firm behavior in origin countries? This paper examines this question in the context of repatriation inflows from the United States and Mexico to El Salvador. The paper combines a rich longitudinal data set covering all formal firms in El Salvador with individual-level data on all registered repatriations from 2010 to 2017. The empirical strategy combines variation in the municipality of birth of individuals repatriated over 1995-2002'before a significant change in deportation policies'with annual variation in aggregate inflows of repatriations to El Salvador. The findings show that repatriations have large negative effects on the average wages of formal workers. This is mainly driven by formal firms in sectors that face more intense competition from the informal sector, which deportees are more likely to join. Repatriation inflows also reduce total employment among formal firms in those sectors. Given that most deportees spend less than a month abroad, these findings suggest that the experience of being detained and deported can have strong negative effects not only on the deportees, but also on their receiving communities.

Deportation --- Employment and Unemployment --- Firm Behavior --- Informal Sector --- Informality --- Labor Costs --- Labor Markets --- Labor Policies --- Labor Supply --- Migration --- Poverty Reduction --- Private Sector Development --- Private Sector Economics --- Social Protections and Labor

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This paper examines the relationship between firm performance and growth and the business environment in the countries of the South Asia Region - Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka - using firm-level data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys. The analysis uses an approach in which the responses of firms to questions about the quality of the business environment can be interpreted as shadow prices: estimations by managers of the cost imposed on the firm by inadequacies of an aspect of the business environment - public inputs such as regulation, physical infrastructure, availability of skilled labor, macroeconomic conditions, rule of law, et cetera - for the growth of their firm. The analysis finds, in line with this approach, that higher-productivity and better-performing firms in the region, and in particular firms that recently expanded their employment and created jobs, report significantly higher constraints in terms of the supply of public inputs. The authors discuss the differences across countries in the importance of various industries, how they relate to various firm characteristics, how informal and rural sector firms are constrained by public inputs, and how firms in the South Asia Region countries compare with firms in the rest of the world.

Business Environment --- Constraints to Firm Growth --- E-Business --- Environmental Economics & Policies --- Firm Behavior --- Formal and Informal Sectors --- International Economics & Trade --- Microfinance --- Private Participation in Infrastructure --- Small Scale Enterprise --- South Asia

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Analysis of firm-level panel data from three sub-Saharan African economies shows that exporting manufacturers have a total factor productivity premium of 11-28 percent. The data do not allow testing of whether these premiums are caused by selection of more efficient producers into exporting or by learning-by-exporting. By thinking about the mechanisms behind selectivity and learning, however, our finding of higher premiums for direct exporters and exporters to outside Africa could be interpreted as being consistent with learning-by-exporting effects. However, if learning-by-exporting is indeed present in the data, we cannot disentangle its effect on productivity from those of more traditionally recognized channels of international technology diffusion.

Exports and Imports --- Macroeconomics --- Production and Operations Management --- Firm Behavior --- Production --- Cost --- Capital and Total Factor Productivity --- Capacity --- Industry Studies: Manufacturing: General --- Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development --- Trade: General --- Macroeconomics: Production --- Foreign Aid --- Labor Economics: General --- International economics --- Labour --- income economics --- Exports --- Productivity --- Foreign aid --- Total factor productivity --- Labor --- International trade --- Imports --- Industrial productivity --- International relief --- Labor economics --- Ghana --- Income economics

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Excess wages tax (EWT) is a tax-based incomes policy instrument introduced in many centrally-planned economies and still used in some FSU and Eastern European countries in transition. The main macroeconomic goal of EWT is to curb inflationary pressures by penalizing through taxation the “excessive” wage awards granted by enterprises in the course of wage and price liberalization. In this paper, effects of EWT on the behavior of a profit-maximizing enterprise under monopsony, its incidence on wages and profits, and its impact on inflation are analyzed. The effect of EWT on an enterprise that maximizes workers’ income is also examined with some observations on EWT’s impact on managerial behavior. Finally, recent experience with EWT is assessed and compared to that suggested by the model.

Labor --- Macroeconomics --- Corporate Taxation --- Business Taxes and Subsidies --- Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents: Firm --- Firm Behavior --- Employment --- Unemployment --- Wages --- Intergenerational Income Distribution --- Aggregate Human Capital --- Aggregate Labor Productivity --- Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs: General --- Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs: Public Policy --- Labor Economics: General --- Labour --- income economics --- Corporate & business tax --- Minimum wages --- Wage adjustments --- Corporate income tax --- Taxes --- Minimum wage --- Corporations --- Taxation --- Labor economics --- Poland, Republic of --- Income economics