Informal Employment in Russia: Measurement, Scale and Dynamics

Employment and social protectionin the informal sector

Employment concentration and resource allocation: one-company towns in Russia

The paper looks at the effects of employment concentration on resource allocation with a particular focus on one-company towns in Russia: towns where a single company accounts for a significant share of total employment. Empirical analysis of firms’ production functions indicates that firms located in one-company towns are characterised by lower labour productivity, higher marginal capital prod...

Regional Variation in Informal Employment: Skills, Norms, and Governance*

Informal economic activity across countries has been studied thoroughly in the empirical literature, but little research addresses the sources of variation in informality on the sub-national level. This paper analyzes reasons for regional variation in informal employment. It develops a theoretical model, which predicts that worker skill endowment, quality of local governance, and social norms a...

Labor Standards and Informal Employment in Latin America

— This paper addresses the hypothesis that higher labor standards––in particular freedom of association and collective bargaining rights––and higher wages in the formal sector reduce employment in that sector and thereby contribute to the informalization of employment. This issue is explored using panel data on specific categories of formal and informal employment for 14 Latin American countrie...

Informal employment and health status in Central America

BACKGROUND Informal employment is assumed to be an important but seldom studied social determinant of health, affecting a large number of workers around the world. Although informal employment arrangements constitute a permanent, structural pillar of many labor markets in low- and middle-income countries, studies about its relationship with health status are still scarce. In Central America mor...