Suchergebnisse

This dissertation examines the impacts of India's trade liberalization and a variety of other policies on productivity and employment among manufacturing firms. One main contribution of this work is that it considers not only large firms in India's organized (formal) manufacturing sector, but also small firms in the unorganized (informal) manufacturing sector. Informal firms are those that have fewer than 20 employees (10 employees if power is used), and are therefore not required to register with the government under India's Factories Act. Most of the literature on India's trade and other reforms has focused on formal firms, but the informal sector accounts for approximately 80% of manufacturing employment.In the first chapter, I describe a unique dataset that I constructed by linking formal and informal firm-level surveys that were conducted by the Indian government. The resulting dataset provides three cross-sectional snapshots that are representative of the entire manufacturing industry during the course of the 1990's. This chapter discusses the industries in which formal and informal firms are found, examines various issues related to the size distribution of firms, and compares formal and informal firms with the same number of employees.The second chapter examines the impact of India's trade liberalization on the productivity of manufacturing firms. Despite a large literature investigating the links between trade and productivity, there is almost no evidence on how small firms react to trade liberalization. In this chapter, I show that India's trade liberalization increased firm productivity in both the formal and informal sectors; however, the increases occurred through different channels in the two sectors. In the informal sector, I find that the liberalization of final goods tariffs increased productivity by approximately 15% during the course of the 1990's. In contrast, the increase in productivity among formal firms was driven by the liberalization of tariffs on intermediate inputs rather than final goods. Furthermore, I examine the effect of the trade liberalization on the productivity and output distributions, and I find evidence suggesting that at least part of the increase in productivity in the informal sector was driven by the exit of the smallest, least productive firms. The third chapter investigates the phenomenon of the "missing middle" in Indian manufacturing - the fact that employment is concentrated in small and large firms, with relatively little employment in mid-sized firms (firms with 50-500 employees). A number of policies have been proposed as causes of the missing middle, but there is little quantitative evidence on how changes in these policies would affect the employment size distribution. I consider the impacts of five policies - credit availability for small firms, electricity surpluses, trade liberalization, industrial licensing, and foreign direct investment liberalization - on the employment size distribution. I find that improving India's poor electricity supplies would mitigate the missing middle by shifting the employment size distribution towards firms with 50-1,000 employees. India's liberalization measures of the 1990's had mixed effects on the missing middle: the liberalization of final goods tariffs exacerbated the missing middle, while the liberalization of intermediate input tariffs mitigated it. The foreign direct investment liberalization shifted the employment size distribution towards firms with 20-500 employees, while the industrial licensing reforms shifted the distribution towards firms with 10-60 employees, and away from firms with 60 or more employees. The results also indicate that India's labor regulations played a role in how many of these policies affected the missing middle.

An ongoing debate in employment policy is whether promoting small and medium enterprises creates jobs. We use the elimination of small-scale industry (SSI) promotion in India to address this question. For 60 years, SSI promotion in India focused on reserving certain products for manufacture by small and medium enterprises. We identify the consequences for employment growth, investment, output, productivity, and wages of dismantling India's SSI reservations. We exploit variation in the timing of de-reservation across products and also measure the long-run impact of national SSI policy changes using variation in pretreatment exposure at the district level. Districts more exposed to de-reservation experienced higher employment and output growth. Entrants into the de-reserved product spaces and incumbents that were previously constrained by the size restrictions drove the increase in growth. The results suggest that dismantling India's SSI policies encouraged overall employment growth. (JEL E24, L25, L53, L60, O14, O25)

This report assesses the evidence that exists for the ways in which local air quality could influence local economic growth through health and workforce issues, quality-of-life issues, or air-quality regulations and business operations. It then extrapolates some of the existing results to the Pittsburgh region

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 methods. Workers highly value job stability: the average worker would be willing to forego a 27 percent increase in income to obtain a 1-year contract (relative to no contract), or to forego a 12 percent increase to obtain thirty days of termination notice. There is substantial heterogeneity in WTP by type of employment and gender: women value shorter working hours more than men, while government workers place a higher value on contracts than do private sector employees.

Using a choice experiment among 2,000 workers in Bangladesh, we to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for specific job benefits typically associated with formal employment. We find that workers value job stability the most; the average worker would be willing to forego a 27 percent increase in monthly income in order to obtain a 1-year written contract (relative to no contract), or to forego a 12 percent increase to obtain thirty days of termination notice. On average, government workers place a higher value on contracts than do private sector employees, while casual workers particularly value higher pay. Our use of choice experiments to overcome the challenges associated with estimating WTP for specific job benefits from hedonic wage regressions or from observed job transitions is of interest in its own right, especially in a developing country context where data on worker transitions are unavailable and many workers are informally employed.