Financial Satisfaction and (in)formal Sector in a Transition Country

This paper examines the relationship between working in the formal or informal sector and self-reported individual financial satisfaction in a country in transition. It does so by allowing for individual heterogeneity in terms of perceived financial insecurity and tax morale. The empirical analysis uses a dataset for Albania, a country in transition. The method applied is the ‘self-administered questionnaire’, which combines personal contacts with written questionnaire. The results indicate that, for most individuals, working in the informal sector has negative effects on their self reported financial satisfaction. For some individuals, however, this effect is positive. The characteristic defining these two groups of individuals is their attitude towards the perceived financial insecurity related to not paying taxes. These findings have important implications, in particular for transition countries with large informal sectors. Given the involuntary participation in the informal sector in these countries, the majority of individuals working in this sector will remain financially dissatisfied as long as they have no other social safety net

Segmented or Competitive Labor Markets.

A normal Roy model with four sectors is developed. It allows to derive tests of several assumptions on the working of the labor market: strongly or weakly competitive or segmented. It shows that more important a feature of labor markets than segmentation is the presence of comparative advantages for individuals between the various economic sectors. The model is applied to data on women's labor-force participation in the main towns of Colombia in 1980. It uses multivariate probit and Tobit techniques. Copyright 1991 by The Econometric Society.