Why do people save? A strand of the literature has emphasized the role of ‘precautionary’ motives; i.e., private agents save in order to mitigate unexpected future income shocks. An implication is that in countries faced with more macroeconomic volatility and risk, private saving should be...

Informal jobs offer skill acquisition opportunities that may facilitate a future switch to formal employment for young workers. In this sense, informal training on the job may be a viable alternative to formal schooling in an economy with a large and diverse informal sector. In this paper, I...

Shadow economic activities constitute a large and growing part of all economic activity throughout the world. Because all individuals engaged in these activities wish not to be identified it is very difficult to get accurate information about the relationship between corruption and shadow...

The problems inherent to the informal economy are dealt and analysed by representatives of various institutions. They are focused by scientists, syndicate leaders, politicians and even by the actors therein. Due to the interrelation between the informal economy and the human factor behaviour an...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality and unemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to the same externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal and informal firms have monopoly...

Abstract This study empirically investigates the extent of non compliance with the tax code and the determinants of federal income tax evasion in the U.S. Employing the most recent data we find that 18-19% of total reportable income is not properly reported to the IRS, giving rise to a “tax...

This paper analyses the relationship between house prices and private consumption of the US economy. Based on Granger's causality test, we ask whether this relationship is driven by causality or whether it is merely an ambiguous connection. Based on latest quartely data, our results show that...

The study focused on the early stage of Romania’s transition to the market economy during 1990-1992, based on statistical data available at that time. Because of the inherited structural distortions, the persistence of strong forces of inertia and the incoherence of economic and monetary...

Informal firms play a crucial role in both developing and developed countries, and there is evidence of a larger presence of moonlighting firms over ghost firms. The former are firms that operate simultaneously in the official and unofficial sectors, whereas the ghost firms undertake their...

This paper explores the ability of a class of two-sector dynamic general equilibrium models to generate equilibrium time series for Money Laundering (Ml), through numerical simulations.The paper adopts this approach for the Italian, Us and the Eu-15 economies.The simulations show that Ml...