This paper documents the life cycle of formal and informal plants using five waves of the Mexican establishment census. Formal plants begin operations with three times more workers than informal plants...
Informality is a multidimensional development challenge with features that potentially differ across workers, firms, and countries. This paper first briefly summarizes the literature, discusses the multiple...
Using three rounds of the World Bank's Business Pulse Surveys in South Asia, this paper quantifies the relationship between informality and firms' investment and employment decisions. Accounting for multidimensionality...
Using three rounds of data from the Business Pulse Survey in South Asia, this paper studies the differential effects of the COVID-19 shock on informal firms. It also captures heterogeneity within informal...
The development objective of the Second Phase of the Informal Settlements Improvement Project for Kenya is to enhance access to basic services and tenure security of residents in participating urban informal...
This paper explores the use of digital technologies, their association with performance outcomes, and the main constraints to greater use among microenterprises. The study uses a sample of more than 3,300...
This paper introduces and provides a descriptive analysis of data from more than 15,000 detailed interviews of representative samples of informal businesses operating in 24 cities across seven countries...
This paper explores differences and similarities across formal and informal microenterprises in Senegal. It uses a new national sample of more than 500 firms, of which two-thirds are informal and over...
This study uncovers a gender labor productivity gap among informal firms in 14 developing economies. The results show that labor productivity is approximately 15.2 percent (or 0.165 log point) lower among...