Informal firms make up a major share of the economy in most developing countries. Expanding formalization could increase government tax revenues, boost firm profits and national income, and increase employee well-being by improving access to social security and health and workers’ benefits....

We examine spending on consumption items which have signaling value in social interactions across groups with distinctive social identities in India, where social identities are defined by caste and religious affiliations. Using nationally representative micro data on household consumption...

The changes in women and men's work lives have been considerable in recent decades. Yet much of the recent research on gender differences in employment and earnings has been of a more snapshot nature rather than taking a longer comparative look at evolving patterns. In this paper, we use 50...

Informality is a growing phenomenon in the developing and transition country labor market context. In particular, it is noticeable that working in an informal employment relationship is often not temporary. The degree of persistence of informality in the labor market might be due to different...

This paper explores the labor market, poverty, inequality and pro-poor growth dynamics in the recent economic crisis and recovery in Argentina. In the labor market it is possible to see the diverging experience of the economic crisis and recovery. For instance, the unemployed were more likely to...

This paper investigates a puzzle in the literature on labor markets in developing countries: labor legislations not only have an impact on the formal labor market but also an impact on the informal sector. It has even been argued that the impact on the informal sector in the case of the minimum...

This paper provides a detailed analysis of various dimensions of informality in the Mexican labor market. To understand the nature of informality in terms of regulations and compliance, the legalistic view, and in terms of productivity view of the labor market this paper makes an empirical...

Limited availability of workfare programs and unemployment insurance and a large informal sector are features of the Argentine labor market at the outset of the 2001 economic crisis. This paper tests the hypothesis whether informal work is an alternative to workfare participation before a...

In our research we relate demographic characteristics to risk attitudes that in turn are linked to the incidence of informal or formal employment. Using the 2007 wave of the Ukrainian longitudinal monitoring survey (ULMS) to study the Ukrainian labor market, we first show that the determination...