Análisis por cohortes de la participación laboral en México (1987-2009)

Abstract

This paper decomposes labor force participation, the unemployment rate, and the employment shares of self-employment, and of the formal and informal salaried sectors into age, cohort, and time effects. The life cycle patterns of labor force participation and formal employment follow a standard inverted U-shape. Younger workers are more likely to participate in the informal salaried sector, while self-employment increases monotonically with age. However, significant informal sal-aried employment is also observed among older unskilled workers and women. Strong countercyclical variations are observed for the informal salaried sector, while the opposite occurs for the formal sector. Self-employment fluctuations are countercyclical with a lag. We find an "added worker" effect only during severe recessions among unskilled women. Long-run generational effects show a steadily rising participation in the informal sector with a corresponding decline in formal-ity among newer generations of salaried workers. Some preliminary explanations for this fact are discussed.