Much of the literature on informal employment examines the impact of tangible benefits such as earnings. Little attention has focused on the impact of non-pecuniary benefits on informality. The article has initially applied some of Schwartz’s cultural indices, which include autonomy and embeddedness as a proxy for the desire to be independent, and hypothesizes that such cultural perspective have a substantial influence on informal employment. Using many empirical approaches, the results show that embeddedness has a large, negative, significant effect on informal employment, while an increase in the level of intellectual autonomy results in a great expansion in informal employment.
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