The Economics of Informality Conference 2018

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https://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/18478

The conference will be the first organized by the “Network on Informality Studies” at Universidad del Rosario.
The school of Economics at Universidad del Rosario (Bogota, Colombia) is pleased to invite you to The Economics of Informality Conference 2018. This Conference aims to bring together scholars, experts, young researchers, practitioners and policy makers to present their work and exchange knowledge and debate the issues about informal economy.


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Examinando The Economics of Informality Conference 2018 por Materia "Mercado laboral"

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    Effects of pension benefits on pre-retirement labor supply: Evidence from Chile
    (2018-05-29) Becerra, Oscar; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    This paper describes the effects of pension benefits on pre-retirement labor supplyfor a representative sample of Chilean workers. Using non-linearities in benefits and areform that changed non-contributory pensions, I estimate the effect of pension wealthand pension accrual rate on labor force and contributory-sector participation, earnings,and hours worked. I find that the response of labor supply to future pension benefitsis mostly through the effect of the pension accrual on the probability to contributeto the pension system. My results suggest that pension benefits affect labor supplyallocation, an effect that should be considered in the design of pension reforms.
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    Heterogenous e ects of informality: An application to labor regulation policy in Russia
    (2018-05-28) Otero, Andrea; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    The paper estimates the heterogeneous returns of informality in Russia. The em-pirical strategy uses a Marginal Treatment Effect model (MTE). The data comes fromthe Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) and a combination of regionaldata for the period 2009-2016. I also constructed a measure of enforcement of laborregulation at the regional level that allows me to identify the parameters of the MTEmodel. I find that formal workers have, on average, 20% higher wage rates than in-formal workers. Additionally, the MTE has a negative slope, which reflects the factthat individuals with a higher propensity score of being formal are those who are morelikely to work formally -they have the largest positive gains of this type of jobs on theirearnings. My estimates also show that those individuals with a very low propensityof working formally can be negatively affected by having these types of jobs. Thesefindings suggest that the decision of working formally versus informally responds toa comparative advantage story and not segmentation of the labor market/ability hy-pothesis.
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    Labor flows in Venezuela 1997-2013
    (2018-05-28) Fernández Bujanda, León; Montilla, Mayra; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    This paper measures worker gross flows and instantaneous transition probabilities in Venezuela from 1998 to 2013. We assemble a panel dataset, which is the source of our flow calculations. We contribute to the literature by separating flows from the formal sector employment and from the informal sector employment, which has a significant share of the working` population in Venezuela, to analyze flows between four labor market states. We decompose the contribution of each flow into the cyclical variation of the unemployment rate, the employment-to-population ratio, and the informality rate. This paper finds that change in unemployment is associated mainly with the flow from employment to unemployment. Moreover, the informal sector workers do contribute to fluctuations in the unemployment rate in a larger proportion than the formal sector workers.
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    Labor Market Search, Informality, and On-The-Job Human Capital Accumulation
    (2018-05-28) Bobba, Matteo; Flabbi, Luca; Levy, Santiago; Tejada, Mauricio; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    We develop a search and matching model where firms and workers produce outputthat depends both on match-specific productivity and on worker-specific human capi-tal. The human capital is accumulated while working but depreciates while searchingfor a job. Firms optimally post the formality status wages are determined by bar-gaining. The equilibrium is characterized by an endogenous steady state distributionof human capital and by an endogenous formality rate. We estimate the model onlabor market data from Mexico. We find that human capital accumulation on-the-jobis responsible for about one third of the overall value of production. We also find thathuman capital upgrading is slower while working informally than formally. This mag-nifies the negative impact on productivity of the labor market institutions that giveraise to informality.
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    Optimal Taxation in an Informal Economy
    (2018-05-28) Azuero, Rodrigo; Hernandez, Juan; Wills, Daniel; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    Informality is a widespread phenomenon in developing economies with negativeconsequences on productivity and inequality. Several policies have been implementedto decrease informality such as decreasing corporate tax rates for small businesses, tomake formality more attractive, or reducing payroll taxes to promote formal employ-ment. However, these policies introduce a new set of distortions and is not clear thatintroducing them is optimal. Although the theory of optimal taxation in an economyhas been widely studied in economics, the informal economy has been largely ignoredin this literature. In this paper, we fill this gap by developing a theory of optimal tax-ation in an economy with an informal sector. We construct a novel dataset combininga census of formal and informal businesses in Peru, administrative records from taxauthorities and the national household survey in the country, which allow us to get aunique characterization of the informal economy that we use to quantify the welfaregains from imposing the optimal tax scheme in this economy.
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    Who pays? The distributional impacts of slowing economic growth in Latin American labor markets
    (2018-05-28) Sousa, Liliana; Reyes Ortíz, Giovanni Efraín; The Economics of Informality Conference 2018
    After a decade of strong growth and notable poverty and inequality reduction, Latin America finds itself in a pattern of regional slowdown. What, if any, are the distributional impacts of the slowdown? We study over 6 million labor market transitions from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru to analyze how urban employment dynamics have adjusted to fluctuations in growth over the past decade. In particular, we focus on adjustments to labor market transitions to see if certain transitions, such as movements from employment to unemployment or from formal to informal work, are more sensitive to changes in growth and if some types of workers are more vulnerable to these changes. The results suggest that the emerging economies in this study have not shown significant changes in labor market transitions during the current growth slowdown. However, exploiting a decade of panel data of quarter-to-quarter transitions, we identify some sensitivity of labor market transitions to changes in growth and find that workers in low income quintiles are more likely to experience negative labor transitions than workers in high income quintiles during low growth periods.