This paper investigates the border between formal employment, shadow employment, and unemployment in an equilibrium … employment is correlated with unemployment, and it is tolerated because the repression of shadow activity increases unemployment … the model. The paper suggests also that policies aimed at reducing the shadow economy are likely to increase unemployment. …

This Paper studies the border between shadow employment and unemployment. It argues that the two macroeconomic … the labour market trade-off implied by ‘shadow reducing policies’, it suggests that economies with low unemployment … perform original empirical work on the border between employment, unemployment and inactivity, and we find that Italian shadow …