Winter weather affects hours worked. We examine how work hours reported in the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) vary with respect to snowfall in 265 metropolitan areas over the years 2004-2014. The effects of snowfall on work hours vary across types of workers, occupation, industry, and...

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 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...

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...

Greek economy suffers from economic crisis for over a decade. A continuing problem has been the persistence of a large shadow economy which results in a gap between the tax and social security contribution owed and collected. In this paper, the size of shadow economy (SE) in Greece is estimated...

The soliciting of personal favours for and from others in order to circumvent formal procedures is a common practice across the world, variously known as guanxi, wasta, blat, and jeitinho. Until now, however, there have been no known empirical studies of this practice in South-East Europe. This...

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...

Over the past decade or so, there has been widespread recognition that a large and growing proportion of the global workforce is employed in informal sector enterprises. To explain this, neo-liberals contend that enterprises operate in the informal sector due to high taxes, public sector...

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.,...