This paper analyses the long-term effects of improved small-scale lending, often provided by microfinance institutions set up with the support of development aid. The analysis shows that some common assumptions about microfinance are not true at all: First, it shows that the impact on income...

This paper analyses how tax morale and countries´ institutional quality affect the shadoweconomy, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a variety of potential factors. The literaturestrongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors to understand the level andchanges of...

This paper analyses how governance or institutional quality and tax morale affect the shadoweconomy, using an international country panel and also within country data...

The transition from a command economy in the FSU resulted in increasedactivities in the informal sector. However despite prevalent delays in wagepayments many workers were still observed to be working full-time in theformal sector. Here a model of workers' labour supply decisions...

In the past few years the informal sector in countries in transition hasincreasingly become the focus of research, public policy and the media.The term ‘informal sector’ has been used to describe an extremely widespectrum of activities, which do not necessarily have much in common,such as...

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the size and the growth of Quebec’sunderground economy, and the corresponding loss of taxes for the government. Ourapproach is based on a method developed by Pissarides and Weber (1989) and extended byLyssiotou et al. (2004). The basic hypothesis...

We analyze theoretically and empirically the impact of the shadow economy onentrepreneurial entry, utilising 1998-2005 individual-level Global Entrepreneurship Monitordata merged with macro level variables. A simple correlation coefficient suggests a positivelinear link between the size of the...

The transition economies have lower rates of entrepreneurship than are observed in mostdeveloped and developing market economies. The difference is even more marked in thecountries of the former Soviet Union than those of Central and Eastern Europe. We link thesedifferences partly with the...