It is widely believed that the presence of a large informal sector increases the efficiency costs of social programs in developing countries. We develop a simple theoretical model of optimal unemployment insurance (UI) that specifies the efficiency-insurance tradeoff in the presence of informal...

Few developing countries have adopted an Unemployment Insurance (UI) program but the list of countries considering its implementation is growing. Focusing on the Brazilian UI program and using administrative data covering the universe of formal employment, we provide empirical evidence...

It is widely believed that the presence of a large informal sector increases the efficiency cost of social programs – transfer and social insurance programs – in developing countries. We evaluate such claims for policies that have been heavily studied in countries with low informality –...

It is widely believed that the presence of a large informal sector increases the efficiency cost of social programs - transfer and social insurance programs - in developing countries. We evaluate such claims for policies that have been heavily studied in countries with low informality -...

A key assumption in regression discontinuity analysis is that units cannot manipulate the value of their running variable in a way that guarantees or avoids assignment to the treatment. Standard identification arguments break down if this condition is violated. This paper shows that treatment...

The most common forms of government-mandated job displacement insurance are Severance Pay (SP; lump-sum payments at layoff) and Unemployment Insurance (UI; periodic payments contingent on nonemployment). While there is a vast literature on UI, SP programs have received much less attention, even...