In many countries the shadow employment has a very high priority among policymakers. A new time series for this component of the labour market has been recently released by the Italian institute of statistics. Taken together they give the motivation and the occasion for a fresh analysis of the...

Using data from the Business Surveys Unit of the European Commission, this paper examines how, and how accurately, people assess economic systems. As expected, respondents demonstrate to know their own situation better than the system wide one, and the past better than the future. Also,...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, new annual data on Italian irregular sector for the period 1980-1991 are reconstructed. These data are compatible with the available 1992-2001 official data. Second, based on this self-consistent “long” sample a time series analysis of the two sides...

This paper deals with the Tanzi method for the estimation of underground economy. The approach is discussed and modified. Refinements on the variables and on the econometric technique are proposed. The “adjusted” Tanzi method is then used to estimate the shadow economy in Italy along...

This paper investigates the usefulness of Italian consumer surveys as estimation and forecasting tool over the period 1982-2003. To this end, standard consumption equations are estimated and then compared, in terms of in-sample and out-of-sample predictive ability, with corresponding models...

Using the Hodrick-Prescott filter, this paper examines the cyclical properties of the Italian labour market. Its main contribution is the empirical analysis of three different labour inputs - regular employees, regular self-employed and underground workers. Results from VAR models support the...