Entrepreneurship, On-the-job Search and Informal Jobs

This paper develops a search and matching model of equilibrium unemployment, with on-the-job search, extended to both the informal sector and entrepreneurship. Three are the key features of this model: the entrepreneurial ability affects job productivity, all unemployed start their job search in the official sector, and workers employed in the informal sector try to move into the official one. Two key results emerge from the analysis. First: firms become heterogeneous in productivity, thus providing a new solution to the problem of finding an interior equilibrium where vacant jobs are allocated to both the regular and the hidden sector (the so-called ‘shadow puzzle’). Second: if the informal sector is sufficiently large, an increase in labour market tightness increases the unemployment rate and then the ‘vacancies-unemployment’ relationship (the so-called ‘Beveridge Curve’) switches from negative to positive.