The analysis of taxpayers behaviour and the shadow economy: theoretical approach and empirical evidence for European countries

In the last decades, the consequences of tax evasion and shadow economy have been evident, indeed the wealth is hidden in the black market and it is translated into missed revenues for central government. Sometimes, the new type of approach is necessary to understand different phenomena and the reduction to single equation or formula is not sufficient to describe a single behaviour, of both consumer and producer. As the recent Nobel Prize taught, to achieve a satisfying analysis, we need to approach to new experimental method, based on the expectations of audit and on the interactions among agents, analysed through pure simulations. Taking at the same time two dierent views and combining them, we should offer a new possibility of interaction among quantitative and qualitative methods, underlying the importance of both in a complete and exhaustive analysis. This work, through some different chapters, attempts to debate the tax evasion and the underground economy in a wide perspective and from different points of view. The second chapter, regards a collection of surveys of both tax evasion and shadow economy, gathering dierent models, aspects and solutions to these problems. In this part we analyse the problem of tax evasion and the shadow economy through different methodological approach. Secondly, we focus on Agent-based Model we are going to use in the following part, looking deepen to interactions among agents and creation of network and inuences among them. Subsequently, analysing MIMIC model we will see the pros and cons of this model and how it investigates the problem of shadow economy in European countries. One of the most important problem about this topic is missing data because of underground economy's intrinsic nature is unobservable and we need some approximations to evaluate it. The third part concerns the Agent-based Model and its application with dierent instruments. From one hand, we use an analytical model derived from Hokamp and Pickhardt (2010), whereas from another hand we use a qualitative model developed by Lsd program of Valente (2008) to analyse the same problem from different points of view and capturing different aspects. The fourth chapter analyses the problem of shadow economy using a MIMIC Model developed by Dell'Anno (2007), compared to the Schneider (2015) estimation and evaluating the different results between two types of modelling.