The 2001 Russian tax reform reduced average tax rates for the personal income tax and the payroll or social tax. It also made the tax structure more regressive. Because individuals in the lower income bracket were for the most part not affected, it is possible to estimate the effects of the...

Having unique data we investigate informal employment and "envelope payments" as additional costs of worker displacement in the Russian labor market. In particular we analyze whether displaced workers experience more involuntary informal employment than their non-displaced counterparts. Our main...

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...

In this paper, we study the influence of the state-regulated minimum wage on informal employment in Russia. In order to estimate minimum wage effects we apply a methodology originally presented by D. Newmark and W. Washer (Neumark and Wascher (1992) "Employment Effects of Minimum Wages and...

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...

Informal activities impact countries'economic development and overall growth. However, studying informal employment is not easy and it is crucial to provide a valid definition of it. This paper contributes to the recent discussion of the measures of informality by taking advantage of a rich...

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...

Informality is a deafining characteristic of labor markets in developing countries. This paper analyzes patterns of mobility across different forms of formal and informal employment in Russia. Using transition matrices and a dynamic multinomial logit model, we find little evidence of entry...