Taxes, social insurance contributions, and undeclared labour in unionized oligopoly

摘要

This paper studies the phenomenon of undeclared labour. In a unionized duopoly with decentralized wage setting and proportional taxation we show that a trade-off exists for employers between contributing to social insurance for their employees and incurring taxes on labour. The configuration among the tax and social insurance contribution rates may thus generate undeclared labour in equilibrium. Nonetheless, those rates can be handled by a social planner so as to tackle undeclared labour at no cost to social welfare, but with welfare distributive consequences. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.