This paper analyzes efficiency in an economy with an informal sector that consists of unregulated self-employment, and where there are no costs of being informal, (Albrecht et al. (2009)). First, assuming workers in the formal sector are ex-ante heterogeneous, I show that this type of economy is...

This paper analyzes the effect of social security and lump sum layoff payment in an economy with an informal sector and savings, where the search effort is unobserved. I characterize the optimal consumption/search/non-participant strategy assuming that workers are risk averse and that formal...