Weekly links June 27: low-income labor markets, ERPs for SMEs, take time to think.

·       Nice review paper by Emily Breza and Supreet Kaur on labor markets in developing countries. “low wage employment may reflect low levels of labor supply to wage work because workers find existing jobs undesirable. A growing number of studies finds evidence that workers do not want the jobs available to them, especially formal low-skilled jobs such as factory work. We argue that at least some of this “low” labor supply is itself a consequence of the conditions associated with poverty”. They provide a variety of stats showing how many people don’t want wage jobs, quit them at high rates if they do take them, and are absent a lot of the time if they don’t quit! They discuss issues like the volatility of household shocks, cultural and network demands, and more as reasons.

·       On the All about Finance blog, Bruhn, Tan and Tran report on an experiment they did with SMEs in Vietnam to provide them with free access to enterprise resource planning (ERP) software along with training on how to use this. Initial take-up was 80%, but usage dropped and was only 35% after 18 months. The blog discusses what drives take-up and drop-out, with the authors waiting for administrative data to track impacts on firm outcomes.

·       On VoxDev, Brown et al. summarize their work on cognitive endurance in Indian primary schools. They document fatigue on tests by showing students are more likely to get a question wrong if it is randomly placed later in a test than near the start, with this effect stronger for kids from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. “We tested an in-school intervention to increase the amount of time students spend on effortful thinking for sustained periods by having students solve cognitively challenging problems on their own for about 20-minute sessions during the school day….Both treatment approaches (solving math problems or playing non-academic games) markedly improved cognitive endurance: students showed 22% less decline in performance over time when engaged in each of these intellectual activities…These effects persisted 3-5 months later following a summer break.”