Gender Differences in Informal Labor-Market Resilience
This paper reports on the universe of garment-making-firm owners in a Ghanaian district capital during the COVID-19 crisis. By July 2020, 80 percent of both male- and female-owned firms were operational. However, pre-pandemic data show that selection into persistent closure differs by gender. Consistent with a cleansing effect of recessions and highlighting the presence of marginal female entrepreneurs, female-owned firms that remain closed past the spring lockdown are negatively selected on pre-pandemic sales. The pre-pandemic sales distributions of female survivors and non-survivors are significantly different from each other. Female owners of non-operational firms exit to non-employment and experience large decreases in overall earnings. In contrast, persistently closed male-owned firms are not selected on pre-pandemic firm characteristics. Instead, male non survivors are 36 percentage points more likely than male survivors to have another income-generating activity prior to the crisis. Male owners of persistently closed firms fully compensate for revenue losses in their core businesses with earnings from these alternative income-generating activities. Taken together, the evidence is most consistent with differential underlying occupational choice fundamentals for self-employed men and women in this context.
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Journal Article biblioteca |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
2022-12-26
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| Subjects: | INFORMALITY, FIRMS, GENDER, COVID-19, |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099742009132324437/IDU0a21e7942070b10444c0bc3309268969a958b https://hdl.handle.net/10986/41331 |
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