Formal Job Research Articles

Welfare Effects of Unemployment Benefits When Informality is High

We analyze for the first time the welfare effects of unemployment benefits (UBs) in a context of high informality, exploiting matched administrative and survey data with individual-level information on UB receipt, formal and informal employment, wages and consumption. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that dismissal from a formal job causes a large drop in consumption, which is between three to six times larger than estimates for developed economies. This is generated by a permanent shift of UB recipients towards informal employment, where they earn substantially lower wages. We then exploit a kink in benefits and show that more generous UBs delay program exit through a substitution of formal with informal employment. However, the disincentive effects are small and short-lived. Because of the high insurance value and the low efficiency costs, welfare effects from increasing UBs are positive for a range of values of the coefficient of relative risk aversion.

Gender Differences in Judicial Decisions under Incomplete Information: Evidence from Child Support Cases

We compare decisions by female and male judges in child support trials where a judge decides on the father's income allocation to children. We investigate two types of cases: 1) when fathers have a formal job, their income is known to judges, and awards are set as a fraction of it, and 2) when fathers work in the informal sector, their income is unknown to judges, and awards are given as a fixed amount of money. By exploiting random assignment of cases to judges, we find that female judges set lower awards in both cases in comparison to male judges. However, the gender gap under incomplete information is around two thirds the size of that under complete information. In exploring mechanisms underlying this difference, we propose a simple framework to elicit judges' beliefs about the unknown income in such cases by using their judicial behaviour in cases where income is known. We find that female judges estimate that the unknown income is higher, but still award lower amounts of child support than male judges do. Thus, gender differences act as a countervailing force and explain the attenuation of judges' gender differences in decisions under incomplete information.

Landholdings, livelihood choices and household income in the Red River Delta, Vietnam

ABSTRACT Land scarcity has frequently been cited as the primary barrier preventing rural households from pursuing better livelihoods in Vietnam and other developing societies. In this paper, we investigate the role of landlessness and landholdings in the choice of livelihoods and in household income in the Red River Delta, the most densely populated region in Vietnam. Using data from the 2018 Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey, our cluster analysis classifies five livelihoods pursued by local households, namely informal wage-earning jobs, formal wage-earning jobs, nonfarm self-employment, agriculture, and non-labor livelihoods. Non-laboring, agricultural, or informal wage-earning households earn less per capita income on average than formal wage-earning or nonfarm self-employment households, according to both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses. Our regression analysis demonstrates that land scarcity is not a significant obstacle preventing rural people from seeking gainful livelihoods in the region. The finding suggests that improving education and supporting non-farm activities should be high-priority government policies for local households with limited land and education. Such policies are expected to help them not only transform their livelihoods but also improve their economic well-being.

PSYCHOLOGICAL CAPITAL IMPACT ON EXTRA ROLE BEHAVIOUR VIA WORK ENGAGEMENT: EVIDENCE FROM THE PAKISTANI BANKING SECTOR

The banking sector in Pakistan has always been one of the most significant economic sectors of the country. The purpose of this paper has been to identify the factors urging bank employees to volunteer themselves for activities outside of their formal job obligations. A total of 315 responses were gathered from the employees of the four private commercial banks in Pakistan. The researchers tested the relationship between the four facets of psychological capital (i.e., efficacy, resilience, optimism, and hope) and the two dimensions of extra role behaviour (individual and organisational). The researchers used the SPSS version 23 to analyse the demographic profiles of the respondents, and the SmartPLS version 3 to test the hypotheses formed using the structural equation modelling technique. The researchers also investigated the mechanism through which psychological impacts extra role behaviour. Under the Job Demands-Resources (JDR) model, work engagement is employed as a mediating variable. The results of the study revealed a significant positive relationship between efficacy, optimism, and resilience with extra role behaviours. However, hope remained insignificant to extra role behaviours. The study outcomes also supported the major hypotheses on the mediating role of work engagement in the relationship between the psychological capital and extra role behaviour. Recommendations for future studies and the limitations of the present study were aslo discussed.

Misogyny in Brazilian Federal Government Agencies for Science and High-Education.

The transformation of women's role in society has been systematically studied. Numerous authors point out that among the factors of extreme relevance to this fact, the main is the increased presence of women in the formal job market. Researches also reveal that the increase in quantity is not reflected equally in all productive sectors nor the egalitarian occupation of high hierarchical positions. The present study aimed to analyze how the presence of women, especially in leadership positions, has evolved at the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Postgraduate Education (CAPES) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) over the last 20 years. For these analyzes, surveys were conducted in the people management systems of the Brazilian Federal Public Administration. The initial hypothesis was that female attendance had increased in both the total number of female servants and in management and auxiliary positions, known as DAS in Brazil; however, evidence shows that women reduced overall agency presence, especially in the number of female Analysts occupying DAS positions. These results indicate that the misogyny observed in the academic sphere of the Brazilian National Postgraduate and Science, Technology, and Innovation systems are replicated in the politic-bureaucratic sphere that manages and sponsors these systems.

Resourcefulness of homeless young people who practise sex work in Pakistan: a qualitative study.

Background Many homeless young people in Pakistan use sex work as a way to generate income, particularly if they have few other options for work. Because it is highly stigmatised, little attention has been paid to the strategies homeless young people use to practise sex work, and what this suggests about their capacities and strengths. Methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 29 homeless young people (aged 16-25years) from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, including nine cisgender heterosexual men, six cisgender heterosexual women, seven cisgender gay men, and seven transgender heterosexual women. Results Participants sought memberships in street-based peer groups where financial gains were contingent on dancing and sex work. To practise their work successfully, participants learned novel skills and mobilised material resources available to them on the streets. Participants talked about how they acquired and benefitted from skills related to beautification, dancing, communication, and sexual services to achieve the necessary standards for entertainment and sex work. Access to material resources like makeup, clothes, rented rooms, mobile phones and condoms made dancing and sex work possible and safer for participants. Conclusions Participants' improvisation with limited resources on the streets has important implications for policy and programs. Showcasing the resourcefulness and capacities of young people encourages a different way of thinking about them. This potential could be utilised in productive ways if they were given the chance to receive mainstream and technical education, better health support and access to the formal job market.

Marginalised Groups’ Survival in an Informal Sector in Tanzania

For a prolonged time, bus passengers condemn the touts in bus stands as distressing individuals. This perception is, being challenged by strong criticism, especially where the unemployment problem in the formal sector is rapidly increasing and poverty in most developing nations is extensively growing. Hence, making people choose informal jobs as the case of touts is apparent. Some scholars perceive the informal sector as a source of living and survival for the unemployed and young people not in the formal job. However, little is known about how touts as marginalised individuals survive in an informal sector setting such as bus terminals, where there are multiple working challenges. Primarily, this is due to data limitations about touts’ survival strategies in informal job. This research paper examines the networking strategies employed by touts in selected bus terminals - Temeke, Ubungo and Kimara in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to survive in the informal sector. The findings indicate that touts working in bus terminals are among the impoverished groups in the country. Touts’ economic survival in such an unsecured informal sector depends on the establishment of better social relations among themselves and their family members.

Gender gaps in labor informality: The motherhood effect

We estimate the short- and long-run labor market impacts of parenthood in a developing country, Chile, based on an event-study approach around the birth of the first child. We find that becoming a mother implies a sharp decline in employment, working hours, and labor earnings, while fathers' outcomes remain unaffected. Importantly, the birth of the first child also produces a strong increase in labor informality among working mothers (38%). All these impacts are milder for highly educated women. We assess mechanisms behind these effects based on a model economy and find that: (i) informal jobs’ flexible working hours prevent some women from leaving the labor market upon motherhood, (ii) improving the quality of social protection of formal jobs tempers this increase in informality. Our results suggest that mothers find in informal jobs the flexibility needed for family-work balance, although it comes at the cost of deteriorating their labor market prospects.

Factors Influencing the Income of Urban Informal Workers: Evidence from Nepal

Due to lack of formal job and flexible nature of informal work, large number of workers are attracted into the informal sector in developing countries. The paper examines the case of urban Nepal to study the impact of informal sector in the incomes and livelihood of such workers. This paper is based on cross-sectional data that was collected in 2020 in all six metropolitan cities of Nepal. The fixed income determination multiple regression model focuses on how the income of informal workers have been affected by various choice variables. Mostly, people of prime working age and early working age are involved in this sector. The empirical results show that the average annual earnings of the respondents was very close to national minimum wage. Most of the selected explanatory variables were significant with positive sign associated with higher level of annual income.

Expanding Middle Class in Indonesia

The Indonesian economy has been one of the promising economies, with an average annual economic growth of about 5% in the last decade. With income per capita US$ 4050 as of 2019, Indonesia is now moving to attain upper-middle-income country status. Indonesia escaped from the lower-middle-income trap that the country has faced since 1985 by improving its human capital through increased attention to education and reduction in poverty. Alongside a significant poverty reduction, the middle class or middle-income population has been significantly growing. According to the National Socio-Economic Survey (SUSENAS), the middle-class household grew from only 9% in 1993 to more than 20% in 2019. The middle class also works as an engine for growth, supporting nearly half of total national consumption. They are more likely of having better human capital, work as white-collar workers, and mostly living in urban areas. Due to the greater education and skills most of those in the middle class, have greater access to working in the formal sector jobs, and some are increasingly running productive business or entrepreneur which drives growth and creating jobs for others (World Bank, 2019).

Anonymity or Distance? Job Search and Labour Market Exclusion in a Growing African City

AbstractWe show that helping young job seekers signal their skills to employers generates large and persistent improvements in their labour market outcomes. We do this by comparing an intervention that improves the ability to signal skills (the “job application workshop”) to a transport subsidy treatment designed to reduce the cost of job search. In the short run, both interventions have large positive effects on the probability of finding a formal job. The workshop also increases the probability of having a stable job with an open-ended contract. Four years later, the workshop significantly increases earnings, job satisfaction, and employment duration, but the effects of the transport subsidy have dissipated. Gains are concentrated on individuals who generally have worse labour market outcomes. Overall, our findings highlight that young people possess valuable skills that are unobservable to employers. Making these skills observable generates earnings gains that are far greater than the cost of the intervention.

Courting Informal Workers: Exclusion, Forbearance, and the Left

AbstractLeftist governments with strong links to organized labor are expected to increase the number of people protected by job security rules. But do they? I explore whether the Left in power at the local level in Brazil cracks down on enterprises that employ noncontract, informal‐sector workers, and implements policies aimed at reducing the size of the informal sector. With a close‐election regression‐discontinuity design, I show that mayors from the Workers' Party (PT) in fact slow down enforcement and improve conditions in the informal sector, rather than encouraging a shift to formal jobs. This reflects a challenge that leftist parties face across the world: how to simultaneously improve the employment prospects and conditions of workers in precarious employment and those in full‐time jobs in the context of increased global competition, segmented labor markets and, in Latin America, truncated welfare states.

Labor Market Policies in a Dual Economy

A structural model of heterogeneous agents is built to account for the labor market dynamics of an economy with a large informal sector and to quantify effects of labor market policies on employment, worker flows, savings and welfare in a dual economy. The introduction of unemployment insurance has only a small impact on unemployment but induces a sectoral reallocation of formal labor into informality. Generous severance payments lower the wage of formal jobs and reduce flows from unemployment to formality. In financing expenditures, shifting a tax burden from labor income to consumption increases the size of a formal sector, enhancing productivity and welfare. Economic and welfare consequences of policy reform can significantly differ from those in a single-sector economy due to workers’ incentives to avoid taxes and maximize transfers by moving across sectors.

The political economy of attaining Universal Primary Education in sub-Saharan Africa: The politics of UPE implementation

This is the second article of a two-article review which examines how key aspects of the dominant political economy in sub-Saharan Africa are influencing the implementation of the policy of Universal Primary Education (UPE). The first article analyses three sets of factors namely new social class relations, new forms of educational competition and distancing and intensifying competition for formal sector jobs. This provides the essential contextual background for this second article which draws on political settlement analysis to explore the politics of the implementation UPE and, in particular, the level of elite political commitment to the attainment of UPE.

Desenvolvimento nacional e emprego: a reforma das leis trabalhistas e a criação de empregos no Brasil

O presente estudo objetiva verificar se a alta taxa de desemprego no Brasil pode ser atribuída ao excesso de direitos assegurados aos empregados pelas normas trabalhistas. A análise tem como marco a entrada em vigor da Lei n. 13.467, em 11/11/2017, que alterou diversas normas trabalhistas, sob a justificativa de que contribuiria para gerar mais empregos formais e movimentar a economia. Para tanto, após uma breve análise da importância do emprego para o desenvolvimento e do seu tratamento constitucional, passou-se à observação de dados estatísticos oficiais anteriores e posteriores à mudança legislativa. A partir dos dados, buscar-se-á responder se a reforma trabalhista proporcionou maior precarização do trabalho e se gerou novos postos formais de trabalho no país. A metodologia utilizada foi a pesquisa bibliográfica em livros e periódicos sobre o tema, além da consulta a bancos de dados e relatórios produzidos por sítios oficiais, como o Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística - IBGE e o Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada - IPEA.

Leading Proactivity in Innovative Startups: A Moderated Mediation Model

Despite the growing research interest in proactivity, little is known about the relational mechanisms that cultivate individuals’ proactivity in the workplace. This research aims to explore the leader–follower relational mechanisms leading to employee proactive performance in innovative startups. The sample consisted of 83 employees from eleven startups. Conditional process modeling was conducted to explore the background relational mechanisms of employee proactive performance. Employees with upward psychological safety (who felt safe to speak up and contribute in front of their leaders) were willing to go beyond their formal roles and job descriptions for the sake of the firm (challenging role orientation). In turn, this orientation predicted self-directed efforts and initiated better ways of doing their job (proactive performance). Under high levels of perceived uncertainty, upward psychological safety was a stronger predictor of proactive performance through a challenging role orientation. This study reveals that upward psychological safety is critical for enhancing employee proactivity at work, particularly under high uncertainty.

Human mobility and urban malaria risk in the main transmission hotspot of Amazonian Brazil.

Malaria in the Amazon is often perceived as an exclusively rural disease, but transmission has been increasingly documented within and near urban centers. Here we explore patterns and causes of urban-to-rural mobility, which places travelers at risk of malaria in Mâncio Lima, the main malaria hotspot in northwestern Brazil. We also analyze rural-to-urban mobility caused by malaria treatment seeking, which poses an additional risk of infection to urban residents. We show that the rural localities most frequently visited by urban residents–typically farming settlements in the vicinity of the town–are those with the most intense malaria transmission and also the most frequent source localities of imported malaria cases diagnosed in the town. The most mobile urban residents are typically poor males 16 to 60-years old from multi-sited households who lack a formal job. Highly mobile residents represent a priority target for more intensive and effective malaria control interventions, that cannot be readily delivered to the entire community, in this and similar urbanized endemic settings across the Amazon.

Do Slum Upgrading Programmes Improve Employment? Evidence from Djibouti

Slum upgrading programmes are high on the international community’s agenda. Yet their impact evaluations remain few and far between, especially when the programmes include different components such as roads, water supply, electricity, and community facilities. In addition, employment is rarely considered as an outcome in the evaluation of slum upgrading programmes, although it is often one of the main priorities of slum upgrading policies. This article analyses the effects on employment of such a programme in a Djibouti slum. It uses a difference-in-difference approach to evaluate the average impact and heterogeneous effects of the programme. We find that the project is unlikely to have improved access to employment in general and to formal wage jobs in particular, as was expected at the start of the project. It has also failed to increase earned income. Nonetheless, we show that self-employed activities have developed, more particularly in places adjacent to the project roads.

Informal work along the business cycle: evidence from Argentina

Abstract This article sheds light on the dynamics of the Argentine labor market, using quarterly data from the Argentine Labor Force Survey for the period 2003Q3 to 2020Q1. We examine quarterly transition rates in a four-state model with formal employment, informal employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation. We compute the contribution of each transition rate to fluctuations in unemployment and informality rates. We identify five stylized facts: (i) Nearly 40% of the fluctuations in the unemployment rate involves unemployment ins and outs from/to informal jobs. (ii) More than 40% of the fluctuations in informality rate are driven by the variance of the formalization rate (transition from informal to formal employment). (iii) Non-participation matters for the understanding of unemployment volatility but also for the comprehension of the volatility on informality. (iv) Regarding gender differences: transition involving non-participation matters more in the variance of female unemployment and informality rates than for their male counterparts. (v) The informal sector plays an important role as a stepping stone to formal jobs for both men and women. Our article provides empirical targets to discipline theoretical modeling of labor market dynamics with a sizeable shadow economy.

Crise Econômica e Emprego Formal: uma análise para as cidades médias baianas

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo investigar em que medida a crise experimentada pela economia brasileira nos anos recentes (2014-2018) impactou o estoque de empregos formais das cidades médias baianas, tomando como referência as informações disponibilizadas na RAIS. A análise registra um mosaico de tendências do comportamento do emprego formal regional baiano fora da RMS, onde ficam as 20 cidades médias baianas. Nestas cidades, estão distribuídos os principais polos produtivos com sua vida societária e seus estoques de trabalho, que apresentaram comportamentos peculiares nas diversas dimensões abordadas que refletem as especificidades de cada um de seus sistemas sociais, gerando redução de custos por exigirem menores salários em época de crise econômica, mas que se caracterizam por maior incerteza dos trabalhadores na busca por sua sobrevivência.