To tackle participation in unregistered employment, the conventional policy approach has been to deter such work by increasing the penalties and risk of detection. Recently, an alternative preventative approach has emerged that tackles participation in unregistered employment by improving...

In recent years, participants in the informal economy have started to be viewed less as rational economic actors who engage in the informal economy when the pay-off is greater than the expected cost of being caught and punished, and more as social actors who engage when their tax morale (i.e.,...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate two contrasting ways of explaining and tackling undeclared work. The rational economic actor approach theorizes undeclared work as arising when the benefits of undertaking undeclared work outweigh the costs, and the policy focus is upon deterring undeclared...

Recently, there has been growing recognition that some formal employees receive from their formal employers two wages, namely an official declared wage plus an additional undeclared (envelope) wage, which reduces the tax and social contributions paid to the authorities. The aim of this paper is...

This paper provides an evidence-based evaluation of the competing ways of explaining and tackling the informal economy. Conventionally, participants have been viewed as rational economic actors who engage in the informal economy when the benefits outweigh the costs, and thus participation is...

To explain the shadow economy in the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, this paper evaluates the relationship between the shadow economy and tax morale. Viewing tax morale as a measure of the symmetry between the codified laws and regulations of formal institutions (state morality)...

In recent years, it has been increasingly recognised that governments seeking to tackle undeclared work effectively should adopt a holistic approach. This seeks to coordinate strategy across the fields of labour, tax and social security law, and to use the full range of policy measures...

The aim of this paper is to conduct an exploratory analysis of factors that might explain the cross-national variations in the level tax morality across the European Union. In order to do this, three competing explanations for the cross-national variations in tax morality will be evaluated which...

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been widespread recognition that the informal economy is a sizeable and growing feature in the global economy. To explain this, neo-liberals have contended that the informal economy is a direct result of over-regulation, high taxes and state...

The analysis of employment relations needs to include work in the informal economy. For this purpose, we propose a ‘degrees of informalization' framework that evaluates the proportion of employment relations infused with informality and the nature of this permeation. We apply this framework to...