Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explain who purchases undeclared home repairs and renovations and their motives to tackle the cash-in-hand consumer culture. The conventional view has been that undeclared home repairs and renovations are sought by those consumers needing to save money...

Purpose: The dominant theorisation of the informal economy views participants as rational economic actors operating in the informal economy when the expected benefits exceed the perceived costs of being caught and punished. Recently, an alternative theory has emerged which views participants as...

Purpose: Until now, most scholars have used one of four competing theories to explain undeclared work. Political economy theories explain undeclared work as resulting from the exclusion of workers from formal work and welfare, neo-liberal theories explain such work as a voluntarily chosen...

Purpose: To transcend the view of employment as either formal or informal, this paper evaluates the prevalence of quasi-formal employment where formal employers pay formal employees an unreported (“envelope”) wage in addition to their formal reported salary. To explain the individual-level...

Purpose: Despite a widespread assertion that wages are lower in the informal than formal economy, there have been few empirical evaluations of whether this is the case and even fewer studies of the gender variations in wage rates in the formal and informal economies. Consequently, whether there...

Purpose – Although it has been recognised that many entrepreneurs operate in the informal economy, little is so far known about their reasons for doing so. The purpose of this paper is to begin to unravel entrepreneurs’ rationales for trading in the informal economy in order to consider what...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine whether men and women starting a business use the informal economy and do so to test the viability of their venture. Design/methodology/approach – To do this, the results of a survey of 595 small business owners in the UK conducted in August...

Purpose – A long‐standing meta‐narrative regarding the future of work is that, over history, economic activity has shifted from the informal into the formal economy and that the informal economy is now a residue existing only in the margins. This paper aims to evaluate critically this...

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a critical overview of the diverse visions of the future of employment. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual framework is presented for understanding the common narrative structure that underpins a multitude of contrasting visions on how employment...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the topic of the informal economy, exploring its definition from both economic and criminological standpoints. It seeks to consider possible linkages with organised crime and the conditions under which these may be facilitated, with reference...