This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

Using the MIMIC method, this paper is a first attempt to estimate the size of the shadow economy of 158 countries over the period 1991 up to 2015. In addition to performing a variety of robustness tests, this paper explicitly addresses endogeneity concerns to the use of GDP as cause and...

We investigate the controversial role of the informal sector in the economy of 64 countries between 2003 and 2007 by focusing for the first time on the impact it has on sovereign debt markets. In addition to a standard ordered Probit regression, we employ two nonparametric neural network...

This paper is the first attempt to directly explore the long-run nonlinear relationship between theshadow economy and level of development. Using a dataset of 158 countries over the period from1996 to 2015, our results reveal a robust U-shaped relationship between the shadow economy sizeand GDP...

In this paper the main focus lies on the development and the size of the shadow economy and of undeclared work (or shadow economy labor force) in OECD, developing and transition countries. Besides informal employment in the rural and non-rural sector also other measures of informal employment...

Religion is increasingly acknowledged to be a cultural dimension which affects economic outcomes in different regards. This contribution focuses on religion's possible impact on the shadow economy. Different dimensions of the religious markets are taken into account. These dimensions refer to...

In this paper we analyze the influence of direct democratic institutions on the size and development of the shadow economies. The framework developed predicts a negative relationship between the degree of direct democracy and the size of the shadow economy. Countries where direct democratic...