Showing 1 - 10 of 21
This paper discusses the problems facing the Mexican economy. It operates under a heavy burden of monopoly and regulation. We focus on two issues that should receive more attention in discussions of Mexican policy. (1) The family is under stress in Mexico and this retards the growth of skills of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013135761
In developing countries, informal firms (those that are not registered with the government) account for about half of all economic activity. We consider three broad views of the role of such firms in economic development. According to the romantic view, these firms would become the engine of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013138466
It is often argued that informal labor markets in developing countries promote growth by reducing the impact of regulation. On the other hand informality may reduce the amount of social protection offered to workers. We extend the wage-posting framework of Burdett and Mortensen (1998) to allow...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013101278
We conduct a field experiment in Sri Lanka providing informal firms incentives to formalize. Information about the registration process and reimbursement of direct costs has no effect. Payments equivalent to one-half to one month (alternatively, 2 months) of the median firm's profits leads to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013066187
This paper investigates the urbanization of the Indian manufacturing sector by combining enterprise data from formal and informal sectors. We find that plants in the formal sector are moving away from urban and into rural locations, while the informal sector is moving from rural to urban...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013066249
Informal payments are a frequently overlooked source of local public finance in developing countries. We use microdata from ten countries to establish stylized facts on the magnitude, form, and distributional implications of this "informal taxation." Informal taxation is widespread, particularly...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013151392
Economists argue that rich information environments and formal enforcement of contracts are necessary to prevent market failures when information asymmetries exist. We test for the necessity of formal enforcement to overcome the problems of asymmetric information by estimating the value of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012757594
Do new migration opportunities for rural households change the nature and extent of informal risk sharing? We experimentally document that randomly offering poor rural households subsidies to migrate leads to a 40% improvement in risk sharing in their villages. Our model of endogenous migration...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012866187
We study the effects of domestic trade liberalization on labor markets in Botswana. South Africa is the dominant member of the Southern Africa Customs Union. As such, when South Africa liberalized trade in the 1990s, this induced large and plausibly exogenous tariff reductions for the other...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012862049
Absence of well-functioning formal institutions leads to reliance on social networks to enforce informal contracts. Social ties may aid cooperation, but agents vary in network centrality, and this hierarchy may hinder cooperation. To assess the extent to which networks substitute for...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013051751