This paper examines the contribution of Hernando De Soto’s “The Other Path” in the context of the literature on “underground economies”. Various types of “underground economies” are described and are shown to arise from different causes and to have different consequences. The...

The “underground economy” literature has generated a plethora of vague terms (shadow, hidden, subterranean) that have served to confuse rather than clarify the substantive issues raised by the finding that significant segments of economic activity may be imperfectly accounted for in the...

This paper examines the problem of appropriately specifying and estimating the money demand function in the presence of adaptive expectations and partial adjustment mechanisms. The paper demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting distributed lag reduced form representations of the monetary...

What is the optimum quantity of money in a society? This paper answers this question both from the perspective of a utility maximizing model with real balances in the utility function, and employing an inventory theoretic model which focuses attention on the costs of transacting in different...

The size, growth and causes of the US “underground economy” are examined in light of new estimates of foreign holdings of US currency. World dollarization partially resolves the “currency enigma” which refers to the anomaly that roughly 80% of the US currency supply is “missing” and...

This paper presents new evidence on the dynamics of dollarization and euroization for twenty-five transition countries. Estimates of the amount of foreign currency in circulation (FCC) in transition countries are used to develop a new comprehensive dollarization index (CDI) and separate indices...

This paper examines a broad set of alternative temporal cross- section specifications of the demand for money as a means of estimating the degree of substitution between demand deposits and other liquid assets. Despite differences in data bases, model specifications and estimation techniques,...

This paper presents new evidence on the dynamics of dollarization and euroization for twenty-five transition countries. Estimates of the amount of foreign currency in circulation (FCC) in transition countries are used to develop a new comprehensive dollarization index (CDI) and separate indices...

This paper analyses the consequences of the Nixon Administration’s policy of wage-price controls and finds that the controls were essentially ineffective in reducing inflation.

Many public policy decisions require analytical and empirical knowledge concerning the size, growth, causes and consequences of the ‘underground economy”. This paper seeks to clarify the meaning of underground activity, updates various discrepancy and fiscal estimates of its size and growth,...