This paper exploits an extensive Brazilian micro-enterprise survey and the 1996 introduction of a business tax reduction and simplification scheme (SIMPLES) to examine three questions. First, do high tax rates and complex tax regulations really constitute a barrier to the formalization of...

Informalidad: escape y exclusion' explora este heterogeneo sector desde una variedad de perspectivas que van desde la preocupacion por la proteccion de los trabajadores a la productividad de las empresas y a los determinantes de la evasion fiscal. El informe toma y arroja mas luz sobre el...

"The authors employ propensity score matching and a traditional control function approach to examine the impact of participation in various societal institutions on microfirm performance in Mexico. They find that firms that participate in credit markets, receive training, pay taxes, and belong...

Using subnational historical data, this paper establishes the within country persistence of economic activity in the New World over the last half millennium. The paper constructs a data set incorporating measures of pre-colonial population density, new measures of present regional per capita...

The automation and out-sourcing of routine, codifiable tasks are seen as driving polarization in labor markets in high-income countries. This paper first offers several explanations for why developing countries might show differing dynamics, at least for the present. Census data then confirms...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data, and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...

Using detailed survey data on management practices, this paper uses recent advances in unconditional quantile analysis to study the changes in the within country distribution of management quality associated with country convergence to the managerial frontier. It then decomposes the contribution...