Economic informality on the U.S.‐Mexican border: A (re)view from South Texas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this paper, we review and extend previous work on U.S.‐Mexico border economic informality with a special focus on the South Texas borderlands. Specifically, we offer three conceptual models of economic informality relevant to South Texas: 1) the informal marketplace at the border; 2) the confluence of (in)formality through the possession of different forms of personal documentation including the relationship between earnings and individual documentation; and 3) the graduation of informality to formality as informal firms mature (and grow) over time. Each of these models is supported with fieldwork, extended interviews, and case studies from the region. We conclude with a call for further research initiatives based upon the conceptual models proposed and offer methodological suggestions in the conduct of borderlands research on economic informality. Notes Pisani is Professor of International Business at Central Michigan University. Richardson is Professor of Sociology at University of Texas‐Pan American. Patrick is Community Resource and Economic Development Specialist in the Cooperative Extension Service at New Mexico State University.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".