تحریف مالیات، تولیدات خانگی، و کار در بازار سیاه

We empirically investigate the interplay between black market and official exchange rates in Belarus. We use information from Prokopovi.ch, an internet platform that was launched in April 2011. Prokopovi.ch allows Belarusian citizens to trade in a functioning two-way market which, as we show, incorporated publicly available information in an efficient manner. We were able to create a daily-level data set spanning a period of time which coincided with a currency crisis. An ongoing deterioration of the current account and diminishing official reserve assets in early 2011 led to increased dysfunction in the official foreign exchange market within Belarus, as banks increasingly refused to sell foreign currency at the official rates. Starting in May 2011, the Lukashenko regime repeatedly devalued the Belarusian ruble, and, in October 2011 finally abandoned fixed exchange rates that had significantly overvalued it. We use several statistical techniques to investigate how the official and black market exchange rates interacted during this period. Our data suggest that the devaluations and the transition towards a free floating regime were anticipated by the black market.

This paper studies effects of taxation on the distribution of household work in three parts of an economy: within the own household; as paid work in the legal (“white”) sector subject to taxation; or as paid work in the illegal or informal (“black”) sector where taxes are evaded. The focus is (1) on the extent to which taxation inefficiently pushes activity out of the paid legal white sector into either the black or own-household sector, and (2) the relationships among marginal taxes, the distribution of work in the three types of activity, and allocative inefficiency.

I have studied a model where household service production can be carried out either within households as regular paid “white” market work or as “black” market work where taxes are evaded. Households are of two types: “high-productivity” types have a comparative advantage in “industrial” versus household service production. In the absence of a black market, all household work is carried out in the (more efficient) white market provided that the overall tax wedge in the economy is “low”, and done by households themselves when the tax wedge is “high”. When the tax wedge is in an intermediate range, only low-productivity households do their own household work. A black market was introduced with productivity intermediate between own-household and white production, and where suppliers and demanders incur costly search. Either low-productivity or high-productivity individuals, but never both, demand black services, which are always supplied by low-productivity individuals.