Research on informal employment in transition countries has been very limited because of a lack of appropriate data. A new rich panel data set from Ukraine, the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS), enables us to provide some empirical evidence on informal employment in Ukraine and...

Do firms employing undocumented workers have a competitive advantage? Using administrative data from the state of Georgia, this paper investigates the incidence of undocumented worker employment across firms and how it affects firm survival. Firms are found to engage in herding behavior, being...

This paper provides a detailed analysis of various dimensions of informality in the Mexican labor market. To understand the nature of informality in terms of regulations and compliance, the legalistic view, and in terms of productivity view of the labor market this paper makes an empirical...

This paper examines the connection between illegal migration, minimum wages and enforcement policy. We first explore the employers' decision regarding the employment of illegal migrants in the presence of an effective minimum wage. We show that the employers' decision depends on the wage gap...

Limited availability of workfare programs and unemployment insurance and a large informal sector are features of the Argentine labor market at the outset of the 2001 economic crisis. This paper tests the hypothesis whether informal work is an alternative to workfare participation before a...

This paper defines informal sector employment and decomposes the difference in earnings distributions between formal and informal sector employees in Tajikistan for 2007. Using the quantile regression decomposition technique proposed by Machado and Mata (2005), we find a significant informal...

Informality is a growing phenomenon in the developing and transition country labor market context. In particular, it is noticeable that working in an informal employment relationship is often not temporary. The degree of persistence of informality in the labor market might be due to different...

In the years 2003-2008 the Russian economy experienced a period of strong and sustained growth, which was accompanied by large worker turnover and rising informality. We investigate whether the burden of informality falls disproportionately on job separators (displaced workers and quitters) in...