We study the causal effects of household tax credits on the willingness to demand legally provided services using two survey experiments with 1.974 German homeowners. Participants choose between hypothetical offers of service providers and are randomly assigned to a policy scenario 1) without a...

Third-party reporting and employers’ tax withholding are powerful compliance mechanisms, as long as the employer and employee do not collude to evade. Using data from randomly assigned on-site audits among 2,462 Norwegian firms, we provide evidence of collusive tax evasion. We find that firms...

During the period 1996-2000, the coverage of VAT in Pakistan rose by twenty times in terms of the number of firms in the tax net and by ten times in terms of the volume of transactions subject to it. This paper leverages this staggered introduction of VAT in the country to estimate its...

Informality of markets is largely perceived as undesirable. Yet, ample evidence suggests that the informal sector contributes substantially in terms of income and employment in the entire developing world. In this paper, tax evaded income is invested in the informal credit market which in turn...

This paper presents the various methods to estimate the size of the shadow economy, their strengths and weaknesses. The purpose of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates that no ideal method to estimate the size and development of the shadow economy exists. Because of its flexibility,...

In this short paper an attempt is undertaken to calculate the tax losses which result from shadow economy activities in a country. These calculations are done for the 28 EU countries, for 3 non-EU countries and for 2 other highly-developed OECD countries. The total tax losses over all 28...

This comment provides a reply to Prof. Feige’s paper with the title “Reflections on the Meaning and Measurement of Unobserved Economies: What do we really know about the ‘Shadow Economy’?”, in which Prof. Feige heavily criticizes me. I show that the same critique which Prof. Feige...

Little is known about the size and determinants of undeclared work. While approaches to measure the shadow economy have been extensively discussed, conventional surveys dominate research on undeclared work. We review and extend this literature by first referring to the most recent survey data on...

In this paper, first, six micro (4) and macro (2) estimation approaches are briefly described; they are the National Accounts Statistics discrepancy method and two new micro survey methods, a third one using a combination of company manager surveys and their knowledge to calibrate the size of the...

Vast literature is available covering main Informal Economy (IE) causes and consequences for Latin America and Caribbean (LAC), but its size estimation has been mainly limited to worldwide models applied to the region. This paper proposes a MIMIC Base Model using a data set composed by 41...