Effects of Colombia’s Social Protection System on Workers’ Choice between Formal and Informal Employment∗
نویسندگان
چکیده
We examine whether the Colombian government’s expansion of publicly provided health insurance in the early nineties created incentives for people to become informal. Using variation in the onset of the Census of the Poor across municipalities and over time, we find robust and consistent estimates of an increase in informal employment between 2 and 5 percentage points after the expansion. As robustness, we also construct a panel of individuals interviewed for the first and second Census of the Poor and find similar results. These results may be of interest to other countries considering similar social program expansions. JEL No. I11, I18, O17.
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