Servizi di pagamento, prelievo di contante e stima del sommerso: i risultati di un'indagine sul caso italiano

Payment services, cash withdrawals and estimate of the shadow economy: an inquiry on the Italian case - Abstract This paper contributes to the debate on the assessment of the size of the shadow economy within the Currency Demand Approach (CDA), answering to the following question: are the traditional stock of currency data adequate to measure the transaction motive in a cash demand function? In the first part of the paper, we argue that using some direct measure of cash transactions rather than the stock of liquid assets as the dependent variable in the money demand equation would provide an improvement to the traditional CDA. Then we apply the revised Currency Demand Approach (Ardizzi et al., 2011) to a dataset of Italian provinces observed in 2009, introducing three innovative aspects with respect to our previous study. First, we take an alternative direct measure of cash transactions. Secondly, we focus on the tax evasion component of the shadow economy. Finally, we use three distinct indicators of detected evasion. The results highlight the robustness of our methodology to the new specification of the estimated model. This allows us to draw some relevant policy implications.