This paper examines the effect of global transition to simpler, flatter income tax systems onthe size of the shadow economy. By offering a new estimation framework, the paper revivesthe traditional electricity consumption approach to measuring the shadow economy. Itovercomes the limitations of...

Two stylized representations are often found in the academic and policy literature oninformality and formality in developing countries. The first is that the informal (or unregulated)sector is more competitive than the formal (or regulated) sector. The second is that contractenforcement is...

Building a model with three imperfect markets – goods, labor and credit – representing aproduct’s life-cycle, we find that goods market frictions drastically change the qualitative andquantitative dynamics of labor market variables. The calibrated model leads to a significantreduction in...

Unemployment may depend on equilibrium in other markets than the labor markets. Thispaper adresses this old idea by introducing search frictions on several markets: in a model ofcredit and labor market imperfections as in Wasmer and Weil (2004), I further introducesearch on the goods market. The...

This paper assesses the impact of product market competition on job instability as proxied bythe use of fixed-term labor contracts. Using both worker data from the Spanish Labor ForceSurvey and firm data from the Spanish Business Strategies Survey, I show that job instabilityrises with...

We estimate the effects of labor market entry conditions on wages for male individuals firstentering the Austrian labor market between 1978 and 2000. We find a large negative effect ofunfavorable entry conditions on starting wages as well as a sizeable negative long-run effect.Specifically, we...

This paper documents a robust empirical regularity: in the long-run, higher trade openness iscausally associated to a lower structural rate of unemployment. We establish this fact using:(i) panel data from 20 OECD countries, (ii) cross-sectional data on a larger set of countries.The time...