This paper examines the emergence of economic clubs and its coherence with the European commitments by analysing business cycle comovements in six industrialised economies, which are pooled into four different clusters. Starting from turning points chronologies, a binary measure of association...

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...

The government influences the equilibrium size of hidden activity. Higher taxes give an incentive to evade. The provision of public services, social transfers and public employment may have offsetting effects on the underground economy. The budget constraint makes the relation between the shadow...

This paper presents some stylised facts about the book-tax gap, i.e. the difference between book and taxable income, of Italian corporations. This divergence is a reflection of the usage of any tax shields and any applicable credits and rebates which, in turn, implies that the concept of taxable...

Using data from the Business Surveys Unit of the European Commission as a long-running-continental-scale experiment, this paper examines how, and how accurately, people assess economic systems. Data show both commonsense (e.g. people know the past better than the future) and puzzling results...

Virtually all governments seek to fight tax evasion exploiting better and better technological devices. Despite of that the phenomenon still remains alive and kicking all around the world. The foregoing naturally arises the question in the title. This paper develops a simple model to provide...

Underground activities affect crucial fiscal ratios generating “gaps” both in government revenues and in national accounts. I address this topic exploiting the peculiarities of the Italian situation. First, I describe the pros and cons of the Italian method to estimate the (non trivial share...

As recently suggested, the shadow economy and its determinants (taxation, regulations, corruption, etc.) are linked such that just two stable equilibria are possible. In the good one there is a small hidden sector, large fiscal revenues and honest/appreciated institutions. The other (bad)...

Persistent and widespread psychological attitudes distort both the subjective probability of future economic events and their retrospective interpretation. It could lead to a systematic gap between (over critic) judgments and (over confident) expectations - the “survey forecast error”. When...

Using data from the Italian Institute of Statistics, I examine the cyclical properties of three labor inputs - regular employees, regular self-employed, and underground workers. Results support the widespread view that, in Italy, the shadow employment functions as an improper tool for increasing...