This paper analyses the potential impacts of introducing unemployment insurance (UI) in middle income countries using the case of Malaysia, which today does not have such a system. The analysis is based on a job search model with unemployment and three employment sectors: formal and informal...

In many economies, there is substantial economic activity in the informal sector, beyond the reach of government policy. Labor market policies, which by definition apply only to the formal sector, can have important spillover effects on the informal sector. The relative sizes of the informal and...

We show that in a search/matching model with endogenous participation in which workers are heterogeneous with respect to market productivity, satisfying the Hosios rule leads to excessive vacancy creation. The reason is that the marginal worker does not internalize the effect of his or her...