HSE Publishing House

This monograph continues the series of publications on the Russian labor market prepared by the team of scholars from the Center for Labour Market Studies at the Higher School of Economics. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of various aspects of informality in the Russian labour market. It discusses a wide range of informality related issues, including its economic nature and causes, evolution and composition, measurement and policy implications. Authors question the labour market segmentation theory and the popular thesis that informal employees represent an inferior segment of the labour force that is trapped in bad jobs. Significant attention is paid to costs and benefits of going informal for workers, firms, and the society. A special focus in the book is on earnings in the formal and informal sectors, their impact on evolution of inequality and formal-informal labour mobility. A few chapters explore impact of institutions (such as taxation and minimum wage) on incidence of informal work. Implications for subjective social status and household well-being are also explored. Most of the chapters presented in the book are based on studies that use large sets of microdata and modern econometric techniques.