This is a note on corruption and underground economy in a Kaldor-type model of the business cycle. It appears that when the economy is booming and underground activities seek to enter the official economy, bureaucrats have the upper hand but until underground businesses cannot tolerate...

Guest-worker programs have been providing rapidly growing economies with millions of temporary foreign workers over the last couple of decades. With the duration of stay strictly limited by program rules in most of the host countries and wages paid to guest workers often set at sub-market...

A matching model will explain both unemployment and economic growth by considering the underground sector and human capital. Three problems can thus be simultaneously accounted for: (i) the persistence of the underground sector, (ii) the ambiguous relationships between underground employment and...

While examining the macroeconomic effects of increased government control of the informal sector, this paper develops a two-sector general equilibrium model featuring matching frictions and worker-firm wage bargaining. Workers search for jobs in both the formal and the informal sector. We...

The underground economy crucially affects growth and unemployment in both developed and developing countries. Nevertheless, this widespread phenomenon does not appear in the basic model for macroeconomic analysis, namely the Aggregate Demand-Aggregate Supply (or simply AD-AS) model. Therefore,...

Fiscal consolidation literature often neglects that there are economies with a sizable underground sector and that most of time it is accounted in GDP statistics. This produces non negligible effects on fiscal multipliers. This paper explores a fiscal consolidation plan calling for a downsizing...

In this paper, using primary data collected from business owners, we examine the nature and obstacles in the informal sector of Uganda. We find that education level matters in the selection of enterprises. The bulk of businesses, like eating kiosks, fish selling, shoe shining among others that...

This paper explores the impact of refugees on the size of the underground economy in 28 European Union countries over the period from 1998 to 2017. It applies a nonlinear methodology by employing dynamic panel threshold estimations. The main findings uncover a nonlinear connection between...