ISET would like to congratulate resident faculty member Norberto Pignatti on the publication of a new article (together with Hartmut Lehmann of the University of Bologna) entitled “Informal Employment Relationships and the Labor Market: is there Segmentation in Ukraine?”, in the Journal of Comparative Economics. Working Paper versions of the article are available here and here.

The authors investigated whether the Ukrainian labor market is segmented along a formal-informal divide, slicing the data by gender and age. Using information from the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, covering the period of 2003-2007, they tested alternative hypotheses about the functioning of the Ukrainian labor market and the role of informal employment. They concluded that for a large number of informal employees, informal employment is used as a waiting stage to enter formal salaried employment and is not voluntarily chosen, potentially implying a loss of well-being associated with labor market segmentation. This is not true, however, as far as self-employment is concerned.