An extra class combined with my usual extracurricular writing schedule has made this an extra busy semester for me. The good thing is that I now have several working papers making the rounds and several other papers to clean up once field comps are finished.

A paper I wrote with Pete Leeson, "Good for the Goose, Bad for the Gander: International Labor Standards and Comparative Development" was recently accepted for publication in the the Journal of Labor Research. Pete and I look at the issue of international labor standards, especially those pushed by the International Labour Organization (ILO). The ILO argues that certain labor standards (such as collective bargaining) are so universal as to be "core" labor standards akin to human rights.

As Pete summarized the paper on The Austrian Economists:

We investigate this claim by examining the timing of labor standard adoption in highly developed countries. These nations were all once as poor as today's developing countries and made the tradeoff between labor standards and income in the past. Their experience therefore suggests a safe income threshold for adopting similar labor standards in the developing world.

Using current GDP per capita levels and growth rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, we determine how far these developing countries are from achieving the development threshold the highly developed world reached before it created various labor standards. We find that every ILO-proposed labor standard is highly premature for Sub-Saharan Africa. These countries are between 100 and 300 years from reaching this threshold. ILO-proposed policy is exactly backward. A substantial relaxation of labor standards is the appropriate labor policy for this part of the developing world.

Click on the title of the paper above or here for an Adobe copy of the paper.