Informality is at the center of the economic debate in Colombia, fueled by the high level prevalent in the country and its substantial increase during the 1990s. We study the effect of labor market rigidities, namely the increase in non-wage costs and the minimum wage on the size of the informal...

Informal activities impact countries' economic development and overall growth. However, studying informal employment is not easy and it is crucial to provide a valid definition of it. This paper contributes to the recent discussion of the measures of informality by taking advantage of a rich...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of informality on earnings inequality in Russia using the RLMS - HSE data for 2000-2010. We apply decompositions based on the recentered influence functions of unconditional quantiles proposed by Fipro, Fortin and Lemieux (Fipro et al., 2009). Our results...

The Indonesian labour market is characterised by widespread informality. To some extent, these outcomes can be attributed to a sharp increase in the real value of the minimum wage since 2001, when minimum-wage setting was decentralised to the provincial governments. To test this hypothesis, this...

We provide an analysis of enforcement policies applicable to formal sector in dual labor markets. We use a framework with heterogeneous firms, endogenous determination of informal wage and politically dictated enforcement strategies. Firms which operate both in the formal and informal sectors do...

Labor informality and poverty are at high levels in Latin America. In developing countries, poverty and the labor market are related not through unemployment but through employment. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the link between labor informality and poverty in Colombia. To do so,...

Higher inequality reduces capital accumulation and increases the informal economy, which creates additional employment opportunities for low-skilled and deprived people. Despite this positive feedback, informality raises problems for public finances and biases official statistics, reducing the...

We estimate the effects of the arrival of 2.5 million Syrian migrants in Turkey by the end of 2015 on the labor market outcomes of natives, using a difference-in-differences IV methodology. We show that relaxing the common-trend assumption of this methodology -unlike recent papers in the same...

This paper takes stock of informal employment in Russia analyzing its incidence and determinants. Using the regular waves and an informality supplement of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) it develops several measures of informal employment and demonstrates that the incidence...

One of the most important factors that determine individuals’ quality of life and wellbeing is their position in the labor market and the type of jobs that they hold. When workers are rationed out of the formal segment of the labor market against their will, i.e., the labor market is...