January 2020
24Jan

What Aspects of Formality Do Workers Value? Evidence from a Choice Experiment in Bangladesh

By Minhaj Mahmud, Italo A. Gutierrez, Krishna Kumar, Shanthi Nataraj This study uses a choice experiment among 2,000 workers in Bangladesh to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for job attributes: a contract, termination notice, working hours, paid leave, and a pension fund. Using a stated preference method allows calculation of WTP for benefits in this setting, despite the lack of data on worker transitions, and the fact that many workers are self-employed, which makes it difficult to use revealed preference...

January 24, 2020
Articles, Labor Market
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18Jan

How are Employers Responding to an Aging Workforce?

By: Robert L. Clark, Beth Ritter The American population is aging and changes in the population’s age structure are leading to an aging of the nation’s workforce. In addition, changes to age specific participation rates are exacerbating the aging of the national labor force. An important challenge for firms and organizations is how does workforce aging affect labor costs, productivity and the sustainability of the organization. This paper examines employer responses to workforce aging including changes retirement policies, modification...

January 18, 2020
Aging, Articles, Labor Market,
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10Jan

Informality and the Challenge of Pension Adequacy: Outlook and Reform Options for Peru

By: Christoph Freudenberg, Frederik G Toscani Past reforms have put the Peruvian pension system on a largely fiscally sustainable path, but the system faces important challenges in providing adequate pension levels for a large share of the population. Using administrative microdata at the affiliate level, we project replacement rates in the defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) pillars over the next 30 years and simulate the impact of various reform scenarios on the average level and distribution of...

January 10, 2020
Books, Labor Market, Pension design
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10Jan

Effect of Immigration on Depression Among Older Natives in Western Europe

By: Jose Escarce, Lorenzo Rocco To our knowledge, no study has examined the effect of immigration on the health of older natives. We use the Study of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to investigate whether immigration affects depression among natives 65-80 years old. Immigration may increase the supply and lower the price of personal and household services, a term that refers to care services and non-care services such as cleaning, meal preparation, and domestic chores. Higher consumption...

January 10, 2020
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, , ,
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10Jan

Demographic Obstacles to European Growth

By: Thomas F. Cooley, Espen Henriksen, Charlie Nusbaum Since the early 1990’s the growth rates of the four largest European economies—France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom—have slowed. This persistent slowdown suggests a low-frequency structural change is at work. A combination of longer individual life expectancies and declining fertility have led to gradually ageing populations. Demographic change affects economic growth directly through households savings and labor supply decisions and also growth indirectly through the pension systems and the need to...

January 10, 2020
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, , , ,
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December 2019

27Dec

Labor Supply Responses to Health Shocks : Evidence from High-Frequency Labor Market Data from Urban Ghana: World Bank Group Publications

By World Bank Group Publications, World Bank Group, World Bank, Heath Rachel, Mansuri Ghazala, Rijkers Bob Workers in developing countries are subject to frequent health shocks. Using 10 weeks of high-frequency labor market data that were collected in urban Ghana, this paper documents that men are 9 percentage points more likely to work in weeks in which another worker in the household is unexpectedly ill. The paper provides suggestive evidence that these effects are strongest among very risk averse...

December 27, 2019
Books, Labor Market, , ,
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27Dec

The Right of Older Persons to Work and to Access the Labour Market

By Andrew C. Byrnes, Israel Issi Doron, Nena Georgantzi, Bill Mitchell, Bridget Sleap This paper was prepared as a submission to the United Nations General Assembly Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing, which is considering the desirability of the development of a new international treaty on the human rights of older persons. The paper explores issues relating to the participation of older persons in the labour market, in particular the barriers to their entry to and continued participation in paid...

December 27, 2019
Aging, Articles, Labor Market,
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20Dec

Is Informality Good for Business? The Impacts of IDP Inflows on Formal Firms

By Sandra Rozo, Hernan Winkler This paper examines the effects of large inflows of internally displaced persons (IDP), who are primarily absorbed by the informal sector, on the behavior of formal manufacturing firms in Colombia. To identify causal effects, the analysis employs annual, firm-level panel data between 1995 and 2010 and exploits that when conflict intensifies, forcefully displaced individuals tend to migrate to municipalities where people from their origin locations settled earlier. The paper finds that large inflows of...

December 20, 2019
Articles, Labor Market, , ,
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16Dec

The Old-Age Security Motive for Fertility: Evidence from the Extension of Social Pensions in Namibia

By Pauline Rossi (University of Amsterdam), Mathilde Godard (GATE-LSE, Lyon) The old-age security motive for fertility postulates that people's needs for old-age support raise the demand for children. We test this widespread idea using the extension of social pensions in Namibia during the nineties. The reform eliminated inequalities in pension coverage and benefit across regions and ethnic groups. Combining differences in pre-reform pensions and differences in exposure across cohorts, we show that pensions substantially reduce fertility, especially in late...

December 16, 2019
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, , ,
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06Dec

Fintechs and financial inclusion

By Gayatri Murthy, Maria Fernandez-Vida As Fintech companies targeting poor and underserved customers grow and scale, there is a lack of granularity on how their business models solve pain points in financial inclusion and what the industry can learn from the iterations in their business models. CGAP launched a fintech initiative in 2016 to better understand these innovations and draw clear linkages to financial inclusion, where they existed. We worked with 18 fintechs in Africa and South Asia that...

December 6, 2019
Books, Labor Market, System Sustainability, ,
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