Family economic mobility has been a policy concern for decades, with interest heating up further since the 1990s. Using data that tracks individual families' incomes during overlapping 10-year periods from 1978 through 2014, this paper investigates the relationships of factors - family...

The two sides of envy, destructive and constructive, give rise to qualitatively different equilibria, depending on the economic, institutional, and cultural environment. If investment opportunities are scarce, inequality is high, property rights are poorly protected, and social comparisons are...

The evil eye belief is a widespread superstition according to which people can cause harm by a mere envious glance at coveted objects or their owners. This paper argues that such belief originated and persisted as a useful heuristic under conditions in which envy was likely to trigger...

A variety of researchers and public entities have estimated the prevalence of nontraditional work arrangements - using diverse definitions - in recent decades, and the topic has received increasing attention in the past five years. Despite numerous media reports that the prevalence of...

I review a contemporary branch of the informal sector literature that focus on understanding the way firm behavior is affected by the presence of informality and how such distortions have an impact on aggregate variables. The authors in this group all make use of dynamic general equilibrium...

How is the size of the informal sector affected when the distribution of social expenditures across formal and informal workers changes? Given this distribution, how is it affected when the generosity of these transfers changes? We use a search frictions model with informality, (ex post)...

This document presents an alternative to measure informal economic activity at the municipal level for the 2013-2020 period in Mexico. Using satellite images of nightlight and microdata from the 2019 Economic Census, the formal and informal Value Added at the municipal level is estimated using a...

Based on the methodology proposed by Frey and Osborne (2017), we use their estimates for the probability of automation of occupations together with household survey data on the occupational distribution of employment to provide a risk assessment for the threat that automation may pose to the...

The non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is not directly observable and the presence of informal workers imposes an additional challenge in its estimation. Countries with large informal sectors, traditional measures might not depict labor slack properly, as it has the wage...

This paper estimates the effects of increasing the cost of informal jobs on formal firms' and workers' outcomes. We create novel datasets combining administrative records and household surveys data, and exploit exogenous variation in this cost generated by over 480,000 random work-site...