This paper characterizes optimal policies in the presence of tax evasion and undocumented workers. In equilibrium, domestic workers may work exclusively in the formal sector or also in the informal sector. Surprisingly, in equilibrium, wages are always equalized between domestic and undocumented workers, even if they do not work in the same sectors of the economy. This is driven by the interact...

Irit Sinai is a Research and Planning Analyst, at the Institute for Reproductive Health, Georgetown University Medical Center. She holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , and her major research interests are housing , the informal economic sector, and migratio n within developing countries. The use of homes not only for shelter, but als...

The main purpose of this paper is to look at the incorporation of gender and the informal sector within a general equilibrium framework for India. Moreover, we clarify some important links between a gender aware informal sector based social accounting matrix (SAM) and general equilibrium models such as the computable general equilibrium (CGE) models including as a special case the fixed price m...

The urban informal sector is often still looked at as an elephant (Mead and Morrisson, 1996), which we may not be able to define precisely, but we know it when we see it. However, urban informal sector research deals with micro and small enterprises outside the official legal framework. By now we can build on 25 years of case studies, sample surveys and research on the topic. What comes out is ...