Estimating the Size of the Shadow Economy: Methods, Problems and Open Questions

By Friedrich Schneider, Andreas Buehn. Social Science Research Network, 2013

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents the various methods to estimate the size of the shadow econo- my, their strengths and weaknesses. The purpose of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it demon- strates that no ideal method to estimate the size and development of the shadow economy ex- ists. Because of its flexibility, the MIMIC method used to get macro-estimates of the size of the shadow economy is discussed in greater detail. Secondly, the paper focuses on the definition and causal factors of the shadow economy as well as on a comparison of the size of the shad- ow economy using different estimation methods.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e9d7e384f22bf3a5e1df24f20c60bacf164b1e2

Citations in the corpus

• Measuring the shadow economy using company managers (2015, unknown): “Indeed, other papers point out that survey-based methods tend to produce lower estimates than indirect methods (e.g., Feld and Schneider, 2010; Williams, 2013; Buehn and Schneider, 2013).”