The relationship between firms and inequality has been a focus of recent attention globally. This chapter summarizes basic facts about this relationship for Latin America. Unlike advanced economies where superstar firm growth has prompted concerns over disproportionate income growth at the top,...

We build an equilibrium model of a small open economy with labor market frictions and imperfectly enforced regulations. Heterogeneous firms sort into the formal or informal sector. We estimate the model using data from Brazil, and use counterfactual simulations to understand how trade affects...

How does enforcement of labor regulations shape the labor market effects of trade? Does the informal sector introduce greater de facto flexibility, reducing employment losses during bad times? To tackle these questions, we exploit local economic shocks generated by trade liberalization and...

Brazilian labor market informality: a review of the literature. The economic literature relative to Brazilian labor market informality is very disperse and presents a significant lack of organization. In that sense, the purpose of this paper is to organize and discuss on a systematic way the...

This paper develops and estimates an equilibrium model where heterogeneous firms can exploit two margins of informality: (i) not register their business, the extensive margin; and (ii) hire workers "off the books", the intensive margin. The model encompasses the main competing frameworks for...