Italian researcher from McGill University, Francesco Amodio, visited NCID to give a seminar entitled "Labor Market Power, Self-employment, and Development." His paper tries to compare the labor markets in lower-income countries with those of high-income countries. "there are few things that stand out: in poor countries, we typically see in the average local labor market a small number of organizations that are hiring workers, and at the same time a lot of workers pursue self-employment precisely because wages are low, or wages opportunity are scars." 

According to Amodio, "we try to understand whether self-employment one hand and its interactions with the market power of employers on the other hand matter for all these facts and for the effectiveness of these policies that want to promote the creation of jobs." 

Historically, when we think about sustained economic growth, we have seen high-income countries creating salary jobs and good stable jobs. For this reason, policy makers implement policies whose objective is to expand the wage employment sector and expand the available jobs. "Among different policies, the ones that seem to be more successful in expanding wage employment and increasing earnings are the ones that increase firm productivity rather than, for instance, policies that train workers, which have been the focus of some studies in the past."