This paper investigates the border between formal employment, shadow employment, and unemployment in an equilibrium model of the labour market with market frictions. From the labour demand side, firms optimally create legal or shadow employment through a mechanism that is akin to tax evasion....

Identification of the strength of human capital externalities at the aggregate level is still not fully understood. The existing method may yield positive or negative externalities even if wages reflect marginal social products. We propose an approach that yields positive average human capital...

We combine growth theory with US Census data on individual schooling and wages to estimate the aggregate return to human capital and human capital externalities in cities. Our estimates imply that a one year increase in average schooling in cities increases their aggregate labour productivity by...

This Paper studies the border between shadow employment and unemployment. It argues that the two macroeconomic phenomena are two faces of the same coin: any policy aimed at reducing the former will increase the latter. Theoretically, it proposes and solves a matching model of the labour market,...