This paper investigates the response of the shadow economy to banking crises. Our empirical analysis, based on a large sample of countries, suggests that the informal sector is a powerful buffer, which expands at times of banking crises and absorbs a large proportion of the fall in official...

We estimate the unrecorded economy in 49 economies from 1981 to 2005. Our study is based on electricity consumption series which are fil- tered to account for technological change and for the changing weight of the energy-intensive industrial sector. In contrast with studies based on the MIMIC...

What are the causes of the shadow economy? We provide new answers to this old question. The sharp distinction between theoretical priors on the institutional determinants of the shadow economy and the technique used for its measurement is the first novel contribution of the paper. The second...

This paper investigates the response of the shadow economy to banking crises. Our empirical analysis, based on a large sample of countries, suggests that the informal sector is a powerful buffer, which expands at times of banking crises and absorbs a large proportion of the fall in official...