Building upon exhaustive research of extant and often fragmentary contemporary resources, this paper provides a thorough analysis of financial options trading and sales in interwar Czechoslovakia. Whilst focusing primarily on a remarkable bucketshop episode occuring in the late twenties and...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...

Joint-stock companies are among the most fundamental components of a market economy. “Voucher privatization” in the Czech Republic saw an abrupt mushrooming of joint-stock companies where none had appeared for over a generation. This occurred in an environment lacking in guiding...

The paper demonstrates how survey methods and retrospective questions can be put to effective use in the study of shadow-economy dynamics; specifically, the evolution of tax evasion in the Czech Republic. The authors measure the average individual's transition between the shadow and official...