Informality, measured as the share of the employed who do not have access to social security, is high in Lebanon and the Syrian Arab Republic. This paper uses new data from the 2010 Lebanon and Syria matched employer-employee surveys, which include modules that directly test for ability...

Okun's law is formulated as the ratio between GDP and unemployment (UE): β = f(GDP/UE). It is used to investigate the relations between output and labor input across regions or across business cycles. Based on results by James D. Hamilton we replaced the United States UE with employment (EM)...