Nervous people are asked not to register – Newspaper Kommersant No. 31 (7476) dated 20.02.2023

Formal and informal workers practically do not differ in a set of non-cognitive skills – such as openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and goodwill, follows from the work of the Center for Labor Studies at the Higher School of Economics. At the same time, as it turned out, men in the gray sector of the economy are characterized by increased nervousness. Whether this is a consequence of their informal status or, on the contrary, emotional instability contributes to employment without official registration, the researchers have not yet established.

Employees in the white and gray sectors of the Russian economy have a similar set of non-cognitive skills, which refutes the hypothesis of a low quality of human capital in informal employment. This conclusion is contained in a study by Anna Zudina, a researcher at the Center for Labor Studies at the Higher School of Economics.

As the author notes, initially informal labor relations were generally interpreted by researchers within the framework of the theory of segmented markets – the informal segment was understood as low-productive primitive self-employment of those who cannot enter the official sector due to insufficient education and qualifications. Subsequently, economists came to the conclusion that informal employment is heterogeneous, and it can also be voluntary due to its certain advantages in the form of flexible hours and higher earnings due to the ability to not pay taxes. In such a situation, informal workers may be relatively highly skilled and educated. As the relationship of employment was proved not only with cognitive, but also with non-cognitive characteristics of the worker (with socio-psychological or personality traits that are expressed in repetitive behaviors), the question arose about the relationship between such characteristics and informality.

If the evaluation of the cognitive skills of informal workers in the Russian Federation has already been carried out, then the question of how informality and non-cognitive abilities are related has not yet been studied. The new work is based on data from the HSE Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Health of the Population, which contained a special block of questions about non-cognitive skills. It measures five basic personality dimensions – openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion (orientation to the outside world), the ability to come to terms with others, and emotional instability. As an indicator of informal employment, the question from the questionnaire of the same monitoring about the existence of a formal labor contract or contract was used. Thus, a legalist approach to the operationalization of informal employment was used, in which the characteristics of jobs are of fundamental importance, and not the legal status of the enterprise itself.

As the analysis showed, the difference in terms of the presence of non-cognitive skills in formal and informal workers was minimal. Ceteris paribus, the levels of openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and goodwill are practically the same. The only parameter that turned out to be significantly associated with the informal type of employment was neuroticism, and it is typical only for men. However, as the author of the work notes, in order to determine exactly how the presence of greater nervousness is associated with informal employment, additional research is needed – emotional instability can be both a cause of informal employment and be its consequence.

The thesis about the similarity of the non-cognitive profile of informal and formal employees can indirectly confirm that the periods of gray work for many workers alternate with periods of white work. Now in the Russian Federation, from 13 million to 17 million people are employed in the informal sector, while 7 million of them have the main income from such work (for more details, see Kommersant of August 27). The characteristic of informal employment described in the paper, in turn, makes the task of reducing it by strengthening control more difficult – more productive, on the contrary, measures that increase the attractiveness of voluntary legalization look, for example, linking various social benefits to it, including unemployment benefits.

Anastasia Manuylova