This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

The Popular Economy in Urban Latin America: Informality, Materiality and Gender in Commerce' advances comparative knowledge and theoretical reflections on urban popular economies in Latin America by going beyond the lenses of so-called informal and street economies. It develops a...

Introduction: informal economy, vulnerabilities, and popular security-enhancing practices / Isabelle Hillenkamp, Frédéric Lapeyre, and Andreia Lemaître -- Part I. A plurality of socio-economic logics: new Polanyian approaches to informality and vulnerability. Popular cooperatives and local...

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...