Using the data from a supplement to the 2009 RLMS - HSE, we aim to reveal what preferences and constraints determine the choice between formal and informal employment and between selfemployment and wage employment. We depart from the most commonly used approach that relates informality to the...

Numerous studies of informal employment were focused on its possible impact on the income of informal workers. However consequences of informal employment for socioeconomic position of workers and social inequality in general couldn't be reduced to the monetary changes. This article presents the...

The paper discusses evolution of the informal employment in the Russian labour market over the last decade. It uses all consecutive waves of the Labour Force Survey conducted by the Russian Federal State Statistics Service in 1999-2009. Looking inside the informality and tracing its evolution...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of informality on earnings inequality in Russia using the RLMS - HSE data for 2000-2010. We apply decompositions based on the recentered influence functions of unconditional quantiles proposed by Fipro, Fortin and Lemieux (Fipro et al., 2009). Our results...

In this paper I study and compare the earnings distributions for formal and informal workers using the data from the RLMS HSE survey for 2000-2010. I find that during the whole period earnings inequality was significantly higher in the informal sector than in the formal sector. Informality has...