December 2020

23Dec

Financial Incentives and Heterogeneity in Retirement Behavior An Empirical Analysis Based on SHARE-RV Data

By Nicolas Goll, Felizia Hanemann Over the past few decades, different reforms have come into force, which aim at keeping older workers in the labor market longer. Broad literature to date has investigated reform effects for the average worker. Evidence on the heterogeneous reform effects on different groups is to date however relatively sparse. We therefore evaluate the 1992 pension reform in Germany, which gradually introduced actuarial deductions for early retirement between 1997 and 2004. We investigate whether individuals...

December 23, 2020
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07Dec

COVID-19 has worsened the woes of South Asia’s informal sector

By Maurizio Bussolo, Siddarth Sharma, Hans Timmer Informal employment, which includes temporary workers, day laborers, service, or domestic workers, has long been associated with underdevelopment. Following the same logic, informality is expected to disappear gradually as countries further develop and prosper. Yet, despite decades of sustained high growth, South Asia's informal sector shows little sign of abating—even increasing in some cases. More than 80 percent of all South Asia's workers engage in informal activities, and more than 90 percent of the...

December 7, 2020
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November 2020

27Nov

Striving for Better Jobs: The Challenge of Informality in the Middle East and North Africa

By Roberta Gatti, Diego F Angel-Urdinola, Joana Silva, András Bodor While economic growth has been sustained for a number of years in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, this has not resulted in the creation of an adequate number of jobs and has succeeded, at best, in generating low-quality, informal jobs. While there is a great deal of heterogeneity across countries, informality in MENA is widespread, and some countries in the region are...

November 27, 2020
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05Nov

The Future of Work in Latin America and the Caribbean: How Can Technology Facilitate Job Recovery after COVID-19?

By Azuara Herrera, Oliver; Fazio, Maria Victoria; Hand, Anne; Keller, Lukas; Rodríguez Tapia, Catalina; Silva Porto, María Teresa COVID-19 has been a catalyst for three technologies that had had slow adoption rates until just a few months ago: teleworking, on-demand digital platforms, and online training. This is evidenced by the increase in downloads of mobile applications related to these activities. In this interactive note, the sixth in the series The Future of Work in Latin America and the Caribbean,...

November 5, 2020
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October 2020

29Oct

The Changing Nature of Work and Public Pension Coverage: Evidence from the US and Europe

By Axel H. Börsch-Supan, Courtney Coile, Jonathan Cribb, Carl Emmerson and Yuri Pettinicchi We examine non-standard work and its impact on pension coverage via a case study of the US, the UK, and Germany. We find that the share of workers engaged in non-standard work has changed only modestly over time in these three countries, despite the popular perception that a more significant transformation in the nature of work may be underway. We discuss how non-standard work may affect...

October 29, 2020
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15Oct

Workforce Aging, Pension Reforms, and Firm Outcomes

By Francesca Carta, Francesco D’Amuri, Till Von Wachter Raising statutory retirement ages has been a popular policy to increase the labor supply of older workers in the face of population aging. In this paper, we quantify the effect of a sharp and unexpected increase in retirement ages on firms’ input mix and economic outcomes using Italian administrative and survey data on employment, wages, value added and capital. Exploiting information on lifetime pension contributions for the universe of employees, we...

October 15, 2020
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September 2020

15Sep

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 aging populations. Growth accounting identifies the following five sources of economic growth: total factor productivity, capital deepening, labor supply on...

September 15, 2020
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15Sep

The Quality of Employment (QoE) in Nine Latin American Countries: A Multidimensional Perspective

By Kirsten Sehnbruch This paper proposes a methodology for measuring the quality of employment from a multidimensional and public policy perspective in Latin American developing countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay) using household and labor force survey data from 2015. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the QoE can be measured using a multidimensional methodology that can inform policy makers about the state of their labor markets in a way...

September 15, 2020
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August 2020

28Aug

Job and Wage Losses in Informal Sector due to the COVID-19 Lockdown Measures in India

By Xavier Estupinan, Mohit Sharma This paper estimates the job and wage losses of workers, using the lens of informality, due to lockdown measures undertaken by the Government of India to tackle the spread of COVID-19. It focuses on the first two lockdowns when containment measures in India were most stringent in the world. We estimate that 104 million and 69.4 million informally employed workers were at risk of job loss in Lockdown 1.0 and Lockdown 2.0 respectively. Informal...

August 28, 2020
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28Aug

COVID-19 Infections, Labour Market Shocks, and Subjective Well-Being

By Ferdi Botha, John P. Haisken-DeNew This is the first paper to present novel findings on how simultaneously (a) labour market shocks and (b) infections in the household, directly due to COVID-19, have impacted on life satisfaction and domain satisfactions. Using data from a world-wide online survey of almost 5,700 respondents across six countries, we estimate the associations of COVID-19-related labour market shocks and COVID-19 infection with life satisfaction and a range of domain satisfactions. Directly due to COVID-19,...

August 28, 2020
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