More than half of private sector employees in the developing world do not receive legally mandated labor benefits. These regulations have typically been enacted by democratically elected governments, and are valued by both formal and informal workers. Increasing public enforcement (e.g....

Most workers in the developing world do not receive the benefits they are legally entitled to. Why, then, is there so little public enforcement? This paper argues that this is partly because of a lack of an autonomous and professional bureaucracy. Using a novel dataset with objective measures of...

Does compliance with low-cost civic duties increase demand for social accountability? We address this question by conducting a field experiment at train stations in Buenos Aires. We create exogenous variation in compliance with paying the public transportation fare by i) highlighting sanctions...

The author empirically analyzes the effect of government enforcement on compliance with labor regulations in Argentina, a country where only half of the workforce receives all the benefits to which they are legally entitled. Constructing a panel data set of the period 1995–2002 across...