On October 19th, 2018, Adriana Vega successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled "Essays on informal labor markets” supervised by Dr. Raul Ramos and Dr. Antonio Di Paolo.

The doctoral committee was composed of Prof. Dr.  Aysit Tansel (Middle East Thecnical University), Dr. José Luís Roig (Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona) and Dr. Vicente Royuela (Universitat de Barcelona).

This doctoral thesis deals with the analysis of informality in developing countries considering both the worker’s and the firm’s perspective. In a first essay, using data for a wide sample of South and Central America countries, the role of different factors conditioning informality paying special attention to the institutional dimension. The second and third essays focus their attention in Ecuador, being one of the countries in the area with higher prevalence of informality. The second essay study the determinants of the job placement process in the Ecuadorian formal and informal labor market, while the third essay focuses of the dynamics of the formal and informal sectors and the specific patterns of the transitions within these segments.