Immigration, amnesties, and the shadow economy

A Simple Model of Immigration Amnesties∗

We study the outcome of an immigration amnesty for a government that faces a trade-off between minimizing the number of unwanted immigrants and expanding the tax base. Since the government is not credible when announcing a generalized amnesty, both the fiscal benefit and the stock of illegal immigrants are sub-optimal. In addition, we argue that amnesties can occur only at irregular intervals a...

The Why, When and How of Immigration Amnesties

Religion and the Shadow Economy

Religion is increasingly acknowledged to be a cultural dimension which affects economic outcomes in different regards. This contribution focuses on religion’s possible impact on the shadow economy. Different dimensions of the religious markets are taken into account. These dimensions refer to the overall degree of religiosity, the specific impact of different religions, religious competition or...

Corruption and the Shadow Economy

This paper develops a simple framework to analyze the links between corruption and the unofficial economy and their implications for the official economy. In a model of self-selection with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, we show that the entrepreneurs’ option to flee to the underground economy constrains a corrupt official’s ability to introduce distortions to the economy for private gains. The un...

O Immigration and the Economy – – Part Ii

NE OF THE difficult questions that arises in the ongoing public debate on immigration is whether immigrants to the United States represent an overall cost or benefit to the U.S. economy. The answer to this question centers in part on the extent to which immigrants contribute to the labor force, compete for jobs with native workers and provide goods and services that otherwise would not be produ...