Seguro Popular (SP) was introduced in 2002 to provide health insurance to the 50 million Mexicans without Social Security. This paper tests whether the program has had unintended consequences, distorting workers’ incentives to operate in the informal sector. The analysis examines the impact of...

Providing unemployment insurance is particularly problematic in countries with high informality because workers can claim unemployment benefits and work in the informal sector at the same time. This paper proposes a method to evaluate alternative schemes to provide insurance for unemployed...

The benefits of implementing Unemployment Insurance Savings Accounts (UISAs) are studied in the presence of the multiple sources of information frictions often existing in developing countries. A benchmark incomplete markets economy is calibrated to Mexico in the early 2000s. The unconstrained...

This paper develops a four sector equilibrium search and matching model with informal sector employment opportunities and educational choice. We show that underground activities reduce educational at- tainments if informal employment opportunities mainly are available to low educated workers....

We investigate the role of grandparental childcare for fertility decisions of their offspring. Exploiting pension reforms in Italy, we argue that delayed retirement represents a negative shock to the supply of informal childcare for the next generation. We show that, when the maternal...

This paper studies the probability of receiving employer-paid training and training independently of who finance it for permanent and temporary workers in Chile. We use data from the Social Protection Survey, EPS, which allow us to construct a panel of workers with information from 2002, 2004,...

One particularly significant piece of labour legislation in India is the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 (CLA,1970), which regulates labour hired by firms through the offices of a labour contractor - such labour being referred to as 'contract' labour in India. This paper...

This paper provides new measures of labor law enforcement across the world. The constructed dataset shows that countries with more stringent de jure regulation tend to enforce less. While civil law countries tend to have more stringent de jure labor codes as predicted by legal origin theory,...

The paper begins with a discussion of Indian labour law and the increasing use of "contract labour" in Indian formal manufacturing. We question the widespread perception that employment of contract labour provides flexibility to employers in terms of adjustment in response to demand and...

This study seeks to determine the impact on female labor outcomes of the amendment to the Colombian labor law that extended maternity leave from 12 to 14 weeks (Law 1468 of July 2011). To identify this impact, labor market outcomes of two groups of women with different fertility rates are...