Informality, Labor Regulation, and the Business Cycle

Gustavo Leyva () and Carlos Urrutia ()

No 587, 2018 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We analyze the joint impact of employment protection and informality on macroeconomic volatility and the propagation of shocks in emerging economies. For this, we propose a small open economy business cycle model with frictional labor markets, employment protection and an informal sector, modeled as self-employment. The model is calibrated to the Mexican economy, in particular to business cycle moments for employment and informality obtained from our own calculations with the ENOE survey. We show that interest shocks, which affect specifically job creation in the formal sector, are key to obtain a counter-cyclical informality rate. In our model, confronted with similar shocks, the economy without an informal sector features higher macroeconomic volatility. However, an economy with low levels of employment protection would experience larger volatility in employment but smaller TFP and output fluctuations.

Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-iue and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Informality, labor regulation, and the business cycle (2020)
Working Paper: Informality, Labor Regulation, and the Business Cycle (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed018:587

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