Essays on the hidden economy.
详细信息
- 作者：Russo ; Francesco Flaviano.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2009
- 导师：Verdelhan, Adrien,eadvisor
- 毕业院校：Boston University
- ISBN：9781109152487
- CBH：3357781
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：2911936
- Pages：188
文摘
The thesis consists of 3 essays on the hidden and unobservable economy, defined as all the economic activities that are either forbidden by the law or not reported to the tax or statistical administrations. In the first chapter, I study the US hidden economy over the 1990-2003 period. I find that the cyclical component of the GDP is negatively correlated with the cyclical component of the hidden economy GDP, highlighting the existence of a Double Business Cycle. I show that this characterization is robust across different estimation methods. I propose a DSGE model that rationalizes the empirical evidence. According to the model, the key factor that delivers the negative correlation is a process of workers reallocation along the cycle in response to exogenous shocks. In the second chapter, I propose a dynamic model to study the effect of the costs of access and participation to the legal system on the size of the hidden economy in a cross section of countries. The cost of access is related to the monetary expenses that are necessary to start a business and to the opportunity cost of the bureaucratic procedures involved. The cost of participation is related to tax payments and to labor market regulations. I find that most of the cross country differentials in the size of the hidden economy can be accounted for by the differences in the costs of access. In order to validate the model empirically, I show that it delivers a measure of the hidden economy that is highly correlated with all the available estimates and that a regression analysis confirms all the results of the numerical analysis. In the third chapter I turn to the analysis of a specific hidden market, the one for cocaine. The starting observation is that smuggling an illegal good inside a country becomes easier and less costly as the volume of imported goods increases. First because more imports imply an increased number of transporters and, so, an increased potential supply of smugglers. Second because, as the number of shipments increases, the probability of inspecting all of them decreases, lowering the risk born by the smugglers. I test this theory using data on the market for cocaine. I find that an increased volume of imports is robustly associated to a decreased price of cocaine in a panel of countries. I conclude that legal and illegal trade appear to be complementary.