This paper provides a long-term view by studying the effect of the underground or shadow economy on economic growth in the Unites States over the period 1870 to 2014. Shadow activities might spur or retard economic growth depending on their interactions with the formal sector and impacts on the...

A review of the size and nature of the shadow economy and what might be done to tackle it.Reducing tax evasion, the shadow economy and informal employment has been an important policy goal in OECD countries during recent decades. The shadow economy is notoriously difficult to measure, however....

For the first time we develop a time series of tax evasion (in % of official GDP) for 38 OECD countries over the period 1999 to 2010 based on MIMIC model estimations of the shadow economy. Considering indirect taxation and self-employment as the driving forces of tax evasion, we observe a...

This paper is interested in explaining the causes of the simultaneous evolution between economic growth and informality. Using a large annual panel of African countries with a time series of 25 years, ours results show that when the corruption rate is above (below) a threshold of 1.3577,...

We analyze for the first time cash holdings of private households in all euro area countries from 2002 to 2019 within a panel cointegration framework. Besides the traditional determinants of cash demand like transactions balances and opportunity costs, we concentrate on cashless payments media...

The goal of this paper is to provide a preliminary overview of empirical Capability Approach (CA) applications for high-income OECD countries. The survey aims at a basis of mutual exchange on relevant CA issues among researchers analyzing well-being in affluent countries. It focuses on CA...

Central bank independence (CBI) is a very important precondition for price stability. However, the empirical evidence for a correlation between both is relatively weak. In this paper, this weakness is countered with a) an extended measure of monetary commitment, which includes well-known...

Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of "official" GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing...