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While the value of human capital for technological innovation is well acknowledged, literature on the role of vocational training in corporate innovation is notably scarce. The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of government support for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) competencies on Korean firms’ innovation. The author investigates SMEs’ patent applications (supported by the government to varying degrees) while accounting for firms’ market position, ownership and management structure, as well as prior changes in firms’ technologies, products, processes and other characteristics. Alternative hypotheses about management motivation – the “lazy manager”, “career concerns” and “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses – are also evaluated.

Censored and count data analysis methods are used on a panel of 595 Korean firms covering 2005–2015 from the Korean Human Capital Corporate Survey, Intellectual Property Office and National Investment Commission. A regression discontinuity estimator accounts for potential endogeneity because of support for vocational training at firms.

Firms receiving training support are more innovative than firms without support, but latent effects may play a role. The regression-discontinuity model suggests that firms that succeeded only marginally in obtaining support had higher innovative output than non-recipients near the eligibility threshold.

The findings of this study establish that government support had the intended effect on SMEs’ technological capacity. This cannot be discounted as a simple crowding-out effect. The author also establishes that management–ownership separation within firms was conducive to innovation, that product competition had an inverse U-shaped effect and that management–ownership separation had a substitutable relationship with competition in overcoming managers’ effort avoidance. The findings support the “lazy manager” hypothesis over the “career concerns” and the “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate opportunities for early childhood development (ECD) regarding children’s prenatal care, access to nutrition, health, parental care and cognitive-developmental activities, in 33 surveys from 13 countries. A total of 15 indicators for children’s opportunities are assessed including their typical level, inequality across demographic groups, and factors responsible.

Probability regressions estimate the effects of various household circumstances on children’s engagement in development opportunities. Dissimilarity indexes and human opportunity indexes are computed for each ECD dimension. To understand the impact of each household characteristic, Shorrocks-Shapley decomposition is performed.

ECD opportunities are poor but improving and becoming more equal across many countries. Progress is uneven. As may be expected, household wealth affects inequality for ECD opportunities facilitated by markets or governments, but not non-market opportunities. For preventive healthcare and preschool enrollment, access is deteriorating, reflecting low priority given to them in public policy. Children’s height falls behind in the first two years of children’s life, suggesting the need for targeted institutional interventions. Surprisingly, countries experiencing uprisings see conditions improving, while other Arab countries see them stagnating or deteriorating.

Local and national policy should tackle the identified opportunity gaps. Policymakers should allocate proper investment in medical and educational infrastructure and better coordinate support for disadvantaged families to ensure proper prenatal and ECD. International organizations should provide assistance with these programs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and drivers of employment vulnerability among youth in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia, and their propensity to transition to better jobs over time.

The analysis is based on longitudinal data from Labor Market Panel Surveys spanning 6–20 years. The authors use transition matrices to examine the prevalence of transitions between labor market statuses for the same individuals over time, distinguishing between youth and non-youth, and men and women, as well as multinomial logistic regressions that control for individual and family background, including previous labor market status, family wealth and parental education.

The paper finds that youth in all three countries were disadvantaged in terms of labor market outcomes with most young men in particular ending up in vulnerable jobs while women of all ages were most likely to exit the labor market all together, unless they had formal jobs. Moreover, youth who started out in the labor market in a vulnerable job were unlikely to move to a better-quality job over time. Family wealth, parental education and father's occupation were found to be important determinants of labor market outcomes and vulnerability, even after a long period of work experience.

The paper finds that wealth effects, parental education and occupation effects follow workers throughout their careers, implying low equality of opportunity and inter-generational and lifetime mobility.

The findings indicate worsening labor market outcomes over time, heavily influenced by family background. High levels of vulnerable employment persistence, regardless of skill and experience, reinforce the importance of initial labor market outcome on the quality of lifetime employment prospects.

COVID-19 has had various effects on women’s labour supply worldwide. This study investigates how women’s labour market outcomes in the MENA region have been affected by the stringency of governments’ COVID-19 responses and school closures. We examine whether women, particularly those with children at young age, reduced their labour supply to take care of their families during the pandemic.

To investigate whether having a family results in an extra penalty to women’s labour market outcomes, we compare single women to married women and mothers. Using the ERF COVID-19 MENA Monitor Household Surveys, we analyse the key conditions underlying women’s labour market outcomes: (1) wage earnings and labour market status including remaining formally employed, informally, unpaid or self-employed, unemployed or out of the labour force and (2) becoming permanently terminated, being suspended, seeing a reduction in the hours worked or wages, or seeing a delay in one’s wage payments because of COVID-19. Ordered probit and multinomial logit are employed in the case of categorical outcomes, and linear models for wage earnings.

Women, regardless of whether they have children or not, appear to join the labour market out of necessity to help their families in the times of crisis. Child-caring women who are economically inactive are also more likely to enter the labour market. There is little difference between the negative experiences of women with children and child-free women in regard to their monthly pay reduction or delay, or contract termination, but women with children were more likely to experience reduction in hours worked throughout the pandemic.

These findings may not have causal interpretation facilitating accurate inference. This is because of potential omitted variables such as endogenous motivation of women in different circumstances, latent changes in the division of domestic work between care-giving and other household members, or selective sample attrition.

Our analysis explores the multiple channels in which the pandemic has affected the labour outcomes of MENA-region women. Our findings highlight the challenges that hamper the labour market participation of women, and suggest that public policy should strive to balance the share of unpaid care work between men and women and increase men’s involvement, through measures that support child-bearing age women’s engagement in the private sector during crises, invest in childcare services and support decent job creation for all.

Middle East and North African (MENA) countries notoriously exhibit high prevalence of unemployment and informality among a large fraction of population and, at the same time, gender gaps in labour force participation and job mobility. Why is there such persistent labour market segmentation? What is the impact and potential of various formalisation policies in several MENA countries (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia)? An overview of the informal economy is provided with respect to taxonomy, coverage and drivers. Transition matrices and multinomial logistic regressions are applied to longitudinal microdata from labour market panel surveys (LMPS) (in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia), focusing on workers’ occupational mobility regarding their pre-existing status, age cohort, gender and other demographics. Persistent segmentation and low occupational mobility in all countries suggest that informal employment is not driven by choice on the labour supply side but by structural constraints on the demand side. Existing formalisation policies encapsulating distinct stick and carrot strategies and targeting business versus workers achieve rather modest impacts. Promoting social and solidarity enterprises and extending microfinance to informal enterprises are promising policies for the creation of decent jobs.

The purpose of this paper is to present implications of the seller's ability to bid in the four classical auction forms, with independent private values: English, Dutch, first‐ and second‐price auctions.

Under each auction form, the identity of the winning bidder and the expected winning bid are compared between the case when the seller may bid and when he cannot, using equilibrium bidder strategies. The seller's incentive to bid is evaluated.

The strategies and the welfare results differ with auction type and underlying information assumptions – bidders are either aware or unaware of the seller's ability to bid. In the Dutch and the first‐price auctions, seller‐bidding does not affect any classical results. In the English and the second‐price auctions, it leads to no lower expected prices than without it and higher prices with positive probability. In the English and the second‐price auctions, the seller bids above his reservation value and may unintentionally win the auction. These auctions result in inefficiency with positive probability.

The English and the second‐price auctions are the most common real‐world auctions. In these auctions, the seller's ability to bid – secretly or publicly – redistributes welfare among participants and introduces a possibility of inefficiency. Making this ability publicly known does not solve the latter problem. Auctioneers must prevent the seller from bidding, or must select a different auction form when seller‐bidding is anticipated.

The paper clarifies to regulators, auction designers, bidders, and other readers which auction forms are susceptible to subversion by seller‐bidding and what the potential damages are.