In this paper, the extent of the shadow economy in OECD countries is investigated. The estimates of the size of the shadow economy are obtained using the panel-data techniques applied to the data on 38 OECD member states over the period 1991-2007. Our estimates tend to be somewhat lower than the...

Using the case study of Trinidad and Tobago we investigate for an emerging economy the socioeconomic, demographic, and attitudinal characteristics that influence the propensity of individuals in the household sector to participate in the hidden economy and their perception of the risk of...

The goal of this study is to determine the reasons behind high cash demand in several Central European countries, especially Hungary. We distinguish between legal and illegal cash demand in an attempt to model the former. In our approach, legal cash demand can be explained by transactional and...

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the size and the growth of Quebec's underground economy, and the corresponding loss of taxes for the government. Our approach is based on a method developed by Pissarides and Weber (1989) and extended by Lyssiotou et al. (2004). The basic hypothesis...

A matching model will explain both unemployment and economic growth by considering the underground sector. Three problems can thus be simultaneously accounted for: (i) the persistence of underground economy, (ii) the ambiguous relationships between underground employment and unemployment, and...

We re-examine the size of the underground economy in the U.S. between 1972 and 2006, after properly adjusting for several statistical issues relating to its estimation. The dynamic error-correction-based currency demand approach confirms that income tax rates have no contemporaneous effect on...

In this paper, the extent of the shadow economy in OECD countries is investigated. The estimates of the size of the shadow economy are obtained using the panel-data techniques applied to the data on 38 OECD member states over the period 1991-2007. Our estimates tend to be somewhat lower than the...

We examine whether offshoring firms outperform purely domestic firms – in terms of efficiency, innovativeness and skill composition – in the peculiar context of Italy, the G7 country with the largest shadow-economy share. We posit that manufacturing firms – to counter emerging economies'...

This paper studies equilibrium effects of fiscal policy within a dynamic general equilibrium model where tax evasion and underground activities are explicitly incorporated.In particular, we show that a dynamic general equilibrium with tax evasion may give a rational justification for a variant...

We investigate the controversial role of the informal sector in the economy of 64 countries between 2003 and 2007 by focusing for the first time on the impact it has on sovereign debt markets. In addition to a standard ordered Probit regression, we employ two nonparametric neural network...