The rapid growth of substitutes for cash, particularly debit and credit cards, has led economists to predict the advent of the “cashless society”. Yet cash holdings in most developed economies continue to grow and in the U.S., per capita currency holdings now amount to Edgar L. Feige. This...

This paper reviews the meaning and measurement of unobserved economies germane to tax evasion and macroeconomic information systems. These include the unreported, non-observed, underground, illegal, informal and unrecorded economies. It reviews the progress and shortcomings of national and...

Professor Schneider's “Comment” on my “Reflections” paper does not adequately address the key issues concerning the veracity of his findings, namely issues of documentation, normalization, calibration and replication. Further findings of inadequate documentation, suspicious normalization...

This comment provides a reply to Prof. Feige's paper with the title "Reflections on the Meaning and Measurement of Unobserved Economies: What do we really know about the 'Shadow Economy'?", in which Prof. Feige heavily criticizes me. I show that the same critique which Prof. Feige raises against...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

This comment provides a reply to Prof. Feige's paper with the title “Reflections on the Meaning and Measurement of Unobserved Economies: What do we really know about the ‘Shadow Economy'?”, in which Prof. Feige heavily criticizes me. I show that the same critique which Prof. Feige raises...

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...

This paper investigates the response of the shadow economy to banking crises. Our empirical analysis, based on a large sample of countries, suggests that the informal sector is a powerful buffer, which expands at times of banking crises and absorbs a large proportion of the fall in official...