We contribute to the debate on how to assess the size of the underground or shadow economy with a reinterpretation of the traditional Currency Demand Approach (CDA) � la Tanzi. We introduce three main innovations. First, we take as dependent variable in the money demand equation a direct...

The European Union�s VAT system has become vulnerable to organised fraud schemes. In recent years, these schemes, undergoing a change in structure, have affected services and imports of goods from third countries and may also have shifted trade in goods among EU countries. Within the EU-27,...

The paper surveys different approaches to the estimation of the underground economy. First, the focus is on the methodologies adopted by the Italian and French Statistical Institutes, respectively based on the exhaustive estimate of the labour input and on tax compliance data. Secondly, we...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the terms on bank loans and local crime rates, employing a sample of over 300,000 bank-firm relationships. Controlling for firm, market and bank characteristics the results show that where the crime rate is higher borrowers pay higher interest rates,...

The paper considers several approaches to the measurement of firms� tax burden in order to identify significant indicators for the banking sector. It also analyses features of tax provisions which are peculiar to the Italian system. On these bases, it looks at measures affecting the tax...

The paper investigates the relationship between the underground economy and financial deepening. Entrepreneurs can only access external finance by disclosing credible information in formal documentation. This may be impossible for many informal producers, who lack proper accounting records....

The paper empirically tests the relationship between underground labour and schooling achievement for Italy; a country ranking badly in both respects when compared to other high-income economies; with a marked duality between North and South. In order to identify underground workers; we exploit...

Organized crime is widely regarded as damaging to the economy, to say nothing of people�s lives. Yet little is known about the mechanism at work. This paper helps fill the gap by analyzing the impact of organized crime on the allocation of public subsidies to businesses. We assemble an...

I examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to mafia activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their counterfactual economic performance in the absence of organized crime. The synthetic control is a weighted average of other...

This paper examines the creation of some new provinces in Italy in the 1990s to assess whether the reduction in the size of the local jurisdiction led to benefits in terms of local development, human capital and road quality, which are three public goods provided by the Italian provinces in...