This paper explores the labor market returns to working on a victorious political campaign. Using unique administrative data from Brazil, we track the earnings and employment of campaign workers before and after close elections spanning nearly 20 years. We identify sizable returns to working for...

The majority of people in the informal sector have no access to reliable social protection schemes. This holds for the Arab countries just like for other parts of the developing world despite the fact that several Arab countries have made attempts to raise the share of households covered by...

This paper addresses the issue of the gender pay gap in the formal and informal labour markets in Poland. The authors verify the hypothesis of the existence of a gender pay gap in informal work and compare this gap with the one observed in the formal (registered) labour market. Various analyses...

This paper examines the earnings penalties and premiums associated with different types of employment in 73 countries. Workers are divided into four categories: non-professional own-account workers, employers and own-account professionals, informal wage employees, and formal wage employees....

We model the organizational choice of a small firm given formal and informal credit market parameters. We observe a positive relationship between the size of the informal sector and the spread across countries. We take spread as relative inefficiency of the formal credit markets. Furthermore we...

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...

Informality has long been a salient phenomenon in developing country labor markets, thus has been addressed in several theoretical and empirical research. Turkey, given its economic and demographic dynamics, provides rich evidence for a growing, heterogeneous and multifaceted informal labor...

Die WES-Sonderfragen für das vierte Quartal 2019 befassen sich mit dem Ausmaß und den Wirkungen der Schattenwirtschaft. Die Teilnehmer wurden gebeten, Fragen zum Ausmaß der Schattenwirtschaft in den einzelnen Ländern, zu den Gründen für Schattenwirtschaft und zu den Sektoren, die...

The shadow (underground) economy plays a major role in many countries. People evade taxes and regulations by working in the shadow economy or by employing people illegally. On the one hand, this unregulated economic activity can result in reduced tax revenue and public goods and services, lower...

In this paper we theoretically and empirically examine how the interaction between the formal court system and the informal loan network affects a household's decision to start a business. We find that when the formal court system is weak, expansion of informal credit network leads to the...