Working and Saving Informally: The Link between Labor Market Informality and Financial Exclusion

Luca Flabbi and Mauricio Tejada

CHILD Working Papers Series from Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic Economics (CHILD) - CCA

Abstract: The high level of informality and the low level of savings observed in developing countries are fundamentally linked because informal workers have limited access to formal financial institutions. We study this link by developing and estimating a labor market model where workers can be employed both formally and informally and agents can save through both formal and informal financial institutions. We estimate the model on nationally representative data for Colombia and use the estimated model to simulate counterfactual experiments. Results show that reaching full financial inclusion of informal workers would increase savings by 3% a month and formal assets by 21%. The same policy would strongly decrease inequality in assets and mildly decrease inequality in consumption.

Keywords: Informality; financial inclusion; savings; labor market search; structural estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-fle, nep-iue and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.child.carloalberto.org/images/documenti/child105_2022.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cca:wchild:105

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CHILD Working Papers Series from Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic Economics (CHILD) - CCA Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().