and informal workers: 5.3 percent of informal and 3.8 percent of formal workers report to be in poor health (bottom two out of five categories), and 50.5 percent of informal and 45.8 percent of formal workers report to be in good health (top two out of five categories). The distribution of responses is shown in Figure 12. In neither case the difference between informal and formal workers to report good (or bad) health is statistically significant.

Logit regressions confirm that informal workers are not more or less likely to be in either poor or good health, under all specifications. The result is robust against the inclusion of individual, household and job characteristics. Being informally employed is not associated with better or worse self-reported health under all specifications (Table 10, columns 1 to 6). There are a few reasons that may explain this: first, our measure of health is self-reported and if individuals systematically use different benchmarks to rate their health, there could be a bias in the measurement of the outcome variable. A more objective measure of health may be more useful in this regard, but given the complexity of health itself, there is no single perfect measure. Second, results from the previous sub-section showed that informal workers were not more likely to be engaged in activities that were more harmful or dangerous. If that had been the case, we may have seen differences in health outcomes between formal and informal workers. Interestingly, being involved in a hazardous job is not associated to self-reported health either (see columns 3 and 6). Third, while there are typically disparities in health outcomes by socioeconomic characteristics, it is plausible that after controlling for them (e.g., education, income) there are no further systematic disparities between formal and informal workers. Finally, equal access to public medical services may also lead to both formal and informal workers having the same basic health coverage and little systematic differences in self-assessed health across these employment types.

In sum, being employed informally is not associated with a difference in self-assessed health. Controlling for characteristics, we do not find a statistically significant difference in self-reported health outcomes. In addition, our results are not sensitive to how the binary health outcome is defined, i.e., whether we consider good or bad health.

# **Informal employment and happiness**

Lastly, we examine whether informal employment affects the likelihood of being satisfied with one’s life. The specific question in the RLMS that attempts to measure this is formulated as “To what extent are you satisfied with your life in general at the present time?” with possible responses ranging from fully satisfied to not at all satisfied, on a five-point scale. Descriptive summary statistics indicate that informal workers are more likely to report to be less satisfied with life. The distribution of responses on life satisfaction in Figure 13 shows that informal workers are less likely to report to be satisfied and more likely to report to be dissatisfied. We derive two binary variables that are each equal to one and capture the bottom two and top two responses. The difference in the unconditional means of life satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) between formals and 23/67 Informal Employment and Worker’s Wellbeing in Russia