Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

This paper has three goals. First, some theoretical remarks about money laundering (both the demand and supply sides) are made. Second, we provide a quantitative analysis of money laundering and a preliminary review of our empirical findings on the proceeds of transnational crime worldwide, as...

The paper highlights the interaction between the underground economy and corruption, focusing on the regional dimensions of the problem in south-eastern Europe. It discusses the theoretical approach to underground economic activities and focuses on the determinants of the Greek economy, the tax...

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 raises...

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and public debt in 106 countries. Results suggest that corruption leads to an increase in public debt. We also investigate if the effect of corruption on pblic debt is increased by government expenditure, the shadow economy and military...

This paper reviews the meaning and measurement of unobserved economies germane to tax evasion and macroeconomic information systems. These include the unreported, non-observed, underground, illegal, informal and unrecorded economies. It reviews the progress and shortcomings of national and...

Since there are no broadly accepted macro-level estimations for the size of the hidden economy, the interrelationships of the hidden economy with different segments of the labor market have to be approached in a number of different ways. In our cross-country analysis, in parts 2 and 3 we use...

Since there are no broadly accepted macro-level estimations for the size of the hidden economy, the interrelationships of the hidden economy with different segments of the labor market have to be approached in a number of different ways. In our cross-country analysis, in parts 2 and 3 we use...

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...

This paper is the first attempt to directly explore the long-run nonlinearity of the shadow economy. Using a dataset of 158 countries over the period from 1996 to 2015, our results reveal a robust U-shaped relationship between the shadow economy size and GDP per capita. Our results imply that...