In this paper the main focus lies on 'driving forces' of the development and size of the shadow economy in highly developed 39 OECD countries. The influential factors on the shadow economy are tax policies and state regulation, which, if they rise, increase the shadow economy, but also other...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance a new way of explaining and tackling the illegitimate wage practice where employers pay their employees an undeclared (envelope) wage in addition to their formal salary. Drawing upon institutional theory, it is here proposed that envelope wages...

Purpose Until now, there has been scant evidence on the proportion and characteristics of employees working without a written contract or terms of employment. To begin to fill this gap, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the prevalence and distribution of employees without written...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate which groups of the self-employed engage in the informal economy. Until now, self-employed people participating in the informal economy have been predominantly viewed as marginalised populations such as those on a lower income and living in...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate who engages in informal work. The intention in doing so is to analyse whether important causal factors of social exclusion such as age, education, gender and employment status influence participation in informal work in the European Union....

Purpose – Providing support to off‐the‐books business start‐ups to help them make the transition to legitimacy could be a novel and effective method of creating new legitimate business ventures. The purpose of this paper is to advance understanding of why some business start‐ups...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to evaluate the degree to which there is cross‐national cooperation when tackling undeclared work and how the fight against undeclared work in Europe might be more effectively coordinated. Design/methodology/approach – A multi‐stage inductive approach...

To evaluate how undeclared work is being tackled in Croatia this paper reports an e-survey and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in Croatia. It is revealed that, compared with the European Economic Area countries, Croatia has a weak institutional infrastructure for tackling undeclared...

In this paper, the main focus lies on the informal economy and on work in the shadow. The most influential factors on the informal economy are tax policies and state regulation. The size of the informal economy was decreasing over the period 1999 to 2007, from 34.0% to 31.2% for 161 countries...

Negative consequences of undeclared work are reflected in the economy by distorting competition. Thus, employers who do not use declared work have fewer financial obligations and therefore are competing unfairly with those employers who use all kinds of resources and making real efforts to...