The underground economy crucially affects growth and unemployment in both developed and developing countries. Nevertheless, this widespread phenomenon does not appear in the basic model for macroeconomic analysis, namely the Aggregate Demand-Aggregate Supply (or simply AD-AS) model. Therefore,...

We build a general equilibrium model in which both illegal immigration and the size of the informal sector are endogenously determined. In this framework, we show that indirect policy measures such as tax reduction and detection of informal activities can be used as substitutes for border...

Not only has the shadow economy obviously been growing much more rapidly than the official economy in the Western industrialised countries, it also appears to have a growth cycle of its own, running counter to the official economy's growth cycle. This raises a number of important questions for...